![]() ![]() Here in Norfolk, the locals harvested the reeds that grew on the Broads and thatched their houses with them. In Wales they had access to the local slate mines. In Scotland and Northumbria, heather was in abundance and was used as a roofing material. In the south, wheat and straw stalks were popular for thatching. If your walls are constructed from wattle and daub, they could collapse under the weight of the heavier options. Thatched roofs were the norm in Britain for thousands of years, chiefly because it was lighter than the alternatives, meaning it didn’t need strong walls to support the weight of a heavy slate or tiled roof. Traditional thatching uses bundles of straw or grass to provide all the properties of insulation and protection from the elements that we expect from a roof. Long before Glass Reinforced Plastic and concrete came along, there were essentially three options for roofing materials: baked clay tiles (here in the East we favoured pantiles), slate or thatching. Thatching is an ancient roofing solution with a long history in Britain, and Norfolk takes a unique approach to the art. With thatched roofs in the news, we thought we’d take a look at it in this week’s blog. The birds are using the thatched roof of Tithe Barn at Avebury as a ready source of nesting materials, and every solution the National Trust tries has failed as the clever birds find a way around it. You might have seen in the news that a flock of Jackdaws in Wiltshire has caused a lot of damage to a Grade 1 listed building owned by the National Trust – £100,000 worth of damage, to be exact.
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