A bartizan is a small, overhanging, battlemented parapet turret, projecting from the angles at the top of a tower. It was generally pierced with apertures for cross-bowmen, called baristraria. The term bartizan may have been first used by Sir Walter Scott due to a misconception of a 17th-century Scottish misspelling of bertisene for "bertising" – i.e. bretising, or bratticing, a brattice being a battlemented parapet, originally of wood, and temporary.