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The Risp
Among other fashions and customs departed, it may be allowable here to notice an adjunct of the first-floor dwellings of old Edinburgh. The means of bringing a servant to the door was neither a
knocker nor bell, but an apparatus peculiar to Scotland alone, and still used in some parts of Fife, called a risp, which consists of a slender bar of serrated or twisted iron screwed to the door in an upright position, about two inches from it. and furnished with a large ring, by which the bar could be rasped, or risped, in such a way as secured attention.
source-Old and New Edinburgh
