Security, it’s all in the Design
If you’re reading this article and you are not from the UK then you may not know much about the Norman Invasion into the Great Britain that occurred many, many years ago. Apart from giving the British a bloody nose, the Normans integrated into our lands with their culture, wealth and much more.
One of the main things the Normans did was build castles all round the UK, in key strategic locations. Settlements sprouted up all round these Norman castles. One thing the Normans did and did very well was build castles, mostly if not all out of stone, where as the British built in wood and earth.
Castles Made of Sand(Stone)
OK, as you can expect, a Castle built out of stone is going to be far stronger than a castle made from earth and wood. There were, however, two major points that both had in common.
Surround yourself with a big wall and guard just one entrance. If anyone is going to attack then logic suggests the weak point is going to be the entrance into your castle. This idea is nothing new when it comes to building a wall around ourselves; we do it now with our houses.
There is no reason why we can’t do this with our garden walls as well and in fact in some cases we do. You are then in a position to create that boundary between the street and yourselves. This area is the no man’s land, so to speak.
Medieval Defences
In the time when to Normans were building castles they had slots in the walls to shoot arrows at attacker, in front of the main gate a ‘murder hole’ would be constructed, this would be used to pour boiling oil over the attackers. Alas we can’t do this these days otherwise we would some serious time behind bars. What we can do however is fit some quality locks to our doors.
It has always been suggested that the type of lock on a main front door to a house needs be of a dead bolt version and the mechanism needs to be at least 5 levers, if your budget allows fit two, the first one about a third down and the other about one third up on the door.
You can build slots into the walls but only to ask what people want, please don’t start shooting arrows
This article was written by Darrel Walters, CEO and head of the Tech Team at LocksOnline, the UK’s premier online security store. If you would like to read more of Darrels blogs, follow him on Twitter
