Craeft by Alexander Langlands

Author:Alexander Langlands [Alexander Langlands]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571324422
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

I HAD WELL AND truly caught the thatching bug. My wife and I couldn’t even go on an afternoon’s ramble without me picking various plants and considering their potential as a thatch covering. I visited the Highlands on a thatching tour of old Black Houses; I experimented with different thatch types, covering outbuildings with nettles, privies with oat straw, sheds with dock leaf plants. I was impressed by the properties of tansy, a tall perennial weed with a yellow flower and thick woody stem; pulled rather than cut, it performed admirably as a covering over a home-made chicken run. I was unimpressed with Virginia creeper; voluminous and flexible to begin with, its pithy heart rotted out too quickly, leaving its wafer-like barkwood to crumble under the touch. I was most interested in the creative styles of roofing that were adopted in the more extreme parts of Britain and Europe, especially in places where it was hard to come by good serviceable timber to build the roof in the first place.

The seaweed thatches of Læsø in Denmark were a particularly interesting way of making use of a material that was abundant on the beaches of the island. With the driftwood timber sourced from the same locality, and both having been heavily impregnated with saltwater, these roofs preserved well and thus had a remarkably long lifespan. On the Hebridean islands of Scotland the shortage of good straight timber was also keenly felt, and any substantial driftwood that washed up on the beaches would immediately be dedicated to the role of roofing timber in buildings that were necessarily squat to resist the winter gales of the Atlantic Ocean. But it was the method of replicating rafters and batons to hold the basal layers of thatch that was most creative. In place of cut timber, the islanders used a twisted heather rope that was secured to a timber flush with the wall plate. It was then passed up over the ridgeline and down the other side of the pitch before being locked around another timber on the other side and passed back up towards the ridge. This created a giant net across the roof onto which cut turves were laid, overlapping like tiles and with a marram grass thatch secured over the top by virtue of another heather rope net. This really was ingenious and something that I just had to see for myself.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to travel as far as the Hebrides. Keith, aware of my obsession for intriguing thatches, called me one day and said he had a particularly interesting job up on the coast of West Wales and that I should drive over and take a look. This wasn’t an offer I could turn down easily and, persuading my wife into taking an impromptu break, I duly packed the car for an extended stay. The building Keith and his team were working on was an eighteenth-century farmhouse that had retained a number of its early features, chief among them a thatched roof.

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