foregate

plural foregates

1. A main entrance or front gate.

   In front of the long passage of approach was probably a foregate.

   1956, William Richard Lethaby, Architecture, Nature & Magic

   5 more examples

   The Lower town which joins to this, is fortified with a Wall and Castle, and a fore-gate at the entrance.

   1722, William Camden, Britannia: Or a Chorographical Description of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 2

   … and, where the nature of the thing admitteth access, there is first a foregate and a wall furnished with turrets, which enclose four or five acres, …

   1898, Cheshire Notes and Queries - Volumes 3-4

   And men go back to it today and will continue through the centuries to go, and say to themselves, as they pass through the foregates, the Propylaea, and come out through those marvellous shadows into the sunlight and see across there, …

   1911, California Outlook ... - Volume 12

   Further excavation revealed that there had been in the earliest period, perhaps continued to all later times, a foregate, a kind of outer rampart to mask the entrance to the gate so as to require everyone who approached it to do so by a narrow entrance directly in front of the gate and so subject to a concentrated fire of projectiles from the defenders of the gate. This foregate was some fifteen feet in front of the gate itself. At either side of the gate was a great fortress or buttress flanked by a heavy revetement, a fortress also on the north side and a buttress on the south side of the gate.

   1926, Bibliotheca Sacra, volume 83

   A 'foregate' closed this part of the premises off from the lower yard where there was a 'fyer house' and coalyard, a garden and 'other building'.

   1971, Vanessa Parker, The making of Kings Lynn