it's usually on older barns it extends out past the usual roof and comes to a point and they attach a hoist or pulley to it to get it up to the doors of the loft
I know what you are talking about, but don't know what it is called. As a kid (many years ago) I lived on a farm that used a hay fork to lift hay into the loft of a large barn. That was before the days of baled hay. Sorry I don't know the name..
Evidently the hay bale hook or grappling hook as they call it in this article is the hook attatched to the pully attatched to the beam. Here again they just refer to it as the uppermost beam of the barn... www.wright.edu/~robert.rea/hay.ht... Ret 68 below is correct. It is called a hay hood.
