1) These are all places where ashes accumulated or could be placed.
The terms are not well documented. In furnaces and fire-places they were chambers into which ashes might fall but as places outside a dwelling-house they could be where ashes and household refuse was collected, sometimes small buildings. When William Rothenstein the artist wrote about his childhood in Bradford in the 1870s he vividly remembered the backyard, stone-flagged, with a stone ash-pit, a small building for rubbish. The ash-pits had an acrid smell and boys used to set rat-traps in them. Earlier references include: 1603 the messuage, one asse house … the barne, Netherthong
1764 coalehole, ashes hole, Crosland. In 1738, a witness said the ass heap is very near Dobsons door, Calverley.