No Five-Bar Gate Is Standard

Ask for a standard five-bar field gate and you'll be told it's four foot. On paper it is. But go and stand at a real opening and you'll find the posts are never quite square to each other, never quite plumb, and rarely the exact distance apart the catalogue assumes. Timber posts lean over the years, ground shifts, and the gap you're actually trying to close is its own particular size. So an off-the-shelf gate fouls at one end, or swings with a gap at the other, and nobody's happy. That mismatch is the whole reason people end up on the phone to us.

We make every gate to the opening it's going into. We measure the real gap, top and bottom, and build to that. The style we favour is a yeoman rough-stick gate — the bars left with a bit of their own character rather than machined dead straight — braced with a double crisscross so it can't drop or sag on the hinge over time. A gate that big is always trying to pull itself out of square; the bracing is what stops it. Where it suits the setting we'll give it a hockey-stick head, that gentle curved top rail, cut and jointed into the frame rather than bent.

Show me a gatepost that's actually square and I'll eat my hat.

It's all our own cleft and sawn chestnut, mortised and pegged, made to hang and latch cleanly on the posts you've actually got — not the ones a factory imagined. That's the difference between a gate that swings sweetly for thirty years and one you're forever lifting to shut.

If your opening isn't playing by the catalogue, tell us the real measurements and we'll make a gate that fits it.