• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Thatcher

Thatching is fascinating. Back in 1999/ 2000 I was the proud designer and builder of the first new thatched house in Essex for over a century, so became very familiar with reed thatching.
 
Allegedly, some of the gentry used to sleep with a pig in the bed to attract all the bitey things.
 
We had our previous house re-thatched and really enjoyed watching it being done. It took a few months and we were actually quite sad when the thatchers left!
 
Are all thatched rooves netted these days?
From a distance it is not noticeable but up close it really spoils the effect. Necessary perhaps for rodent control?
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I’ve stayed a few times in a Landmark Trust property, Causeway House, near Vindolanda, that has a heather thatch. I think they say it is the last inhabited resi building with heather thatch in England. Perhaps. Not true in Scotland.

There is an unheated bedroom, open to the underside of the roof, and, indeed, the beds have canopies. Mind you they also say that bedroom is unsuitable for use in winter. Nonsense. Southern jessies. I have also been told that open fires helped to deter insects and vermin, just because they were so damned smoky. So you could either be bitten by insect, or kippered.

Or you could go Faroese and just stick turfs on the top.

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Which we have in Scotland too, incidentally. But we had the sense to also weigh them down with stones on strings (apologies if my architectural terminology is getting a bit complex). Where necessary.
 
AndyP said:
Are all thatched rooves netted these days?
From a distance it is not noticeable but up close it really spoils the effect. Necessary perhaps for rodent control?
View attachment 26907
Click to expand...
No, they're not all netted. It is actually at least partly a means of keeping the thatch tight on the roof (it helps prevent wind uplift), but as you say, it's primary purpose is to keep squirrels and rats out of the roof, and to prevent birds making nests. The house I built only had a netted ridge....but unlike the straw thatch in your photo, it was made of the much tougher and courser reed, which is less prone to the issues we've mentioned.
 
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