THE CONSERVATION GLOSSARY

Yett

- (Scottish) open metal grid, hinged to form protection for a doorway, a sort of Scottish portcullis. Yetts, made of wrought iron, were constructed on a "through and through" basis, meaning that the individual iron bars of which they were made, pierced or threaded through other bars, and were themselves threaded through, making the whole thing impossible to dismantel. Victorian replicas often ignored these complexities and employed a simpler arrangement where, for example the vertical bars would have been threaded through the horizontal ones. The same through and through construction was often used to form grills over windows. Where they are set into the jambs, lintel and cill as opposed to being positioned over the opening, they raise interesting questions of how they would have been installed.
Sometimes the word is used to mean a gate.
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