Is this an electrical socket?
If so, what sort of plug is appropriate?
Phone socket, surely?
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Exactly. I don’t think they’re fitted nowadays but there are plenty still in use.
Thank you, gents.
The search continues for the power socket which must be there …
This is where you discover that someone thought the French phone socket a nice form factor for low power mains applications 
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Yes, to confirm, a pair of old inverted T telephone sockets. There are two together as, possibly, the property had two lines at one point, maybe due to a fax machine.
They’re now redundant & will not work if you have ADSL or fibre, unless you do some jiggery pokery to plug the old 'phone wiring into you internet box.
Of course, the previous owner might still have had a POTS line when the property was sold, but as you can no longer ask for such a thing I’m not sure you would be able to take it over as a new owner.
They didn’t have internet, from what they said, but the socket seems to have been connected to something.
I seem to recall we used to have this connected to ADSL line with an adaptor in old days.
2 little copper wires. We had two in our last house, one was labelled “test”, no idea what it was testing for …
I never said they did. POTS stands for Plain Old Telephone Service i.e. an old analogue line. It is these that are being taken out of service so the whole network will eventually be fibre.
Wired properly such sockets were connected via 8 wires (4 pairs), but you are correct; one line only needs 2.
That was the first/master socket, called a DTI (le Dispositif Terminaison Intérieur).
Plugging into that automatically disconnects any extension wiring that might be present, thus allowing line testing without interference from the customer’s potentially dodgy wiring.
Only six wires for a single line, of which only three were used. The extra two wires were used for the provision of a second line on a single socket.
Yes, I know this, but for whatever reason it used to be common to link all 8 (I’ve ripped out many old installations where that is the case).
P.S. One line only needs two wires - the third wire used to be used to avoid bell tinkle, now redundant.
Can’t be any worse than the standard Euro 16A plug/socket design.
Maybe you could tell us what makes it “worse” in your opinion?
You ever have a 16A Euro plug just slide into a matching socket on the first attempt without your having to carefully align it like you were docking spacecraft?
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But they’re not so painful to tread on barefooted
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Pretty much every time, yes.
The tricky ones tend to be sockets built in to cheap extension reels - the shutters get bunged up with dust as such items tend to live in dusty/dirty surroundings. However, a professional wiggle usually sorts them out.
Lucky you.
Every combination of brands I use seem to have tolerance issues.
Indeed. Only when loop disconnect dialing. Modern RJ11 telecom sockets usually only connect the two wires A and B. That’s how mine are wired.
So can we just snip the wires and remove the boxes?