Community member and active contributor to open knowledge, Anne-Karoline Distel returns with another guest blog post about what she has been up to on Wikimedia Projects. This time, she is taking us through a rarely documented but fascinating feature of built heritage and architecture in Ireland- Chamfer Stops. Read on to find out more.
From March to August this year, I had been working on a citizen scientist’s project in the lovely village of Inistioge, known to some from the movie “Circle of Friends” (Q721415). What they didn’t show in the movie, and I cannot think why, are all the fragments of the demolished priory scattered mostly in the graveyard. That’s what my project was about. One of the fragments had a chamfer stop (Q135418538) on it.
You are probably wondering what that is, and it took me a while to find the word for it as well. A chamfer in a building is where the edge has been bevelled off, so that horse-drawn carriages (and drunk people
and now cars) get around the corner easier without damaging it. Most of the ones in Inistioge
(see here ) go especially high up, but I digress…
Corner house with chamfer A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Chamfer stops are the ends of the chamfers. In building corners, they are almost always (I haven’t seen any others) “plain stops” or, less often, “curvedstops” which means they look like an ordinary triangle, when you stand directly under it. In building corners, there are no chamfer stops at the bottom, but in furniture and timbers (not so much in Ireland, I presume), medieval and Tudor doorways, some mullions, fireplaces, church furniture (sedilias, piscinas etc), tomb niches, they do. They mostly went out of fashion in architecture during Georgian times, unless the style was Neo-Gothic or Neo-Tudor, but even then, they mostly (as far as I have ascertained) are plain stops or the odd lamb’s tongue stop. Yes, that is a thing. There are however, other shapes, but it is such a niche topic that architects and archaeologists looking at historical fabrics haven’t quite agreed what to call them. And with most niche topics with very few users of the words, there can be different names in different regions. And some of the shapes do not have names yet, because the shapes are either so rare or because nobody has taken a systematic look at them.
Some of them have a horizontal bar for some reason. Probably just because it was more difficult to carve and thus fancier.
Nonetheless, I have tried to create Wikidata entries for them with photographs to help with the identification. Here are some photographs to give you an idea:
Plain stop, A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Curved bar chamfer stop Phelan Room fire place, A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A run-out chamfer stop in a fireplace at Rothe House. It is carved into the famous Kilkenny black marble, a limestone, A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There are others, but I have not found any examples in the wild or on Wikimedia.
Long story short: When you’re taking photographs of monuments during #WikiLovesMonuments, maybe take a closer look at the chamfers, if there are any. It would be great to have a better representation of them on the web and Wikimedia.
And if there is anyone out there who has different names for the ones already on Wikidata, please add them as synonyms, even though it is very confusing.
I’m also trying to lay my hands on a free digital version of Chamfer-Stops: A Provisional Mode of Reference (Q58429960) or at least cheaper than €48 for the three and a half pages. Have they ever heard of open access?
Enjoy your newly developed Baader-Meinhof effect after reading this! And enjoy Wiki Loves Monuments!
Find out more here.
