Little Haseley , South Oxon.
Hmmm, he's going to need Sgt Lewis for help in this area.
Posted on 07/12/2016 8:03:24 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Morning TC,
There we have the reason for using Very long passwords.
Stops the Cats ordering on Ama*on.
LOL! They could be ordering expensive cat food and not even using the free shipping option.
I like the decorative thatching at the top of the roofs.
The Decorative trim along the top has become fashionable again. Nice to see its revival.
It was common to see thick moss and bushes growing out from thatched roofs when I was a kid. Thankfully they have mostly all been rethatched over the last couple of decades.
Little Haseley , South Oxon.
Hmmm, he's going to need Sgt Lewis for help in this area.
That hedging to the left could use a trim.
LoL!
Being the Kitchen end it could be an Apple tree, but a trim is certainly in order, :)
‘morning all.
The FR software informs me that:
“Before you may post this message, the following must be corrected:”
Could not find anybody named ‘Tax chock’
Best to take a caffeine break for the moment.
Nice thatch work there, especially the doily ridge line cover. How did they ever do that?
Dremel tool?
I saw one in LA that said “FLOODED WHEN WET”...
“Dremel tool? “
That’s just Ace ,TC. LOL !
Thumped into place with a ‘Club’, then cut to length with Shears and a good paddling to induce the chamfer along the bottom edge.
They use Hazelnut twigs, stap’es and rods, to hold it all in place.
I was searching my memory to describe the thatchwork at that ridgeline, doily not being quite right.
Up popped antimacassar.
While checking the spelling, meaning, and blah, blah, blah....this,
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/antimacassar
Mobile-friendly
· Seen and Heard. What made you want to look up antimacassar? Please tell us where you read or heard it...
What the heck does M-W do with that sort of information?
Anticipate M-W publishing a humor page, “Top 100 goofy reasons for looking up a word”
In any case, antimacassar is a cloth placed across the back of a chair or it’s arms as protection for upholstery against oil stains, specifically Macassar oil, the popular hair dressing of the day.
All well and good, though it leaves one with the image of menfolk rubbing their well oiled hatracks all over the sitting room furniture like dogs in heat.
My mother had antimacassars on the sofas in the living room when I was a girl. It was just a thing you did.
In the time period when they were actually useful, only men leaned back and rested their heads on the backs of furniture. Women were wearing corsets and had to sit bolt upright on the edge of the seat.
BBL
:)
Thanks for the schematic.
They used "top men".
Good morning, Bob.
The new-builds? Surely this is the last place you'd find thatched cottages? Not in Dorset. "If someone wants to build a complex of 10 houses, in order to get planning permission they'd probably have to do three or four in thatch to blend in," he says.
Developers are a canny bunch, and this suits Holloway well.
We are on site at what's called a re-thatch, which does what it says on the tin and still makes up the majority of Holloway's work. Thatched roofs last around 30 years. The minute you lay one, it slowly starts to rot. Looking pretty isn't cheap. "I usually tell a customer they should be putting away £1,500 to £2,000 a year to cover it."
We climb a ladder to roof level. The old thatch has been stripped down to its underwear – a dry and musty, thin petticoat of thatch.
Sometimes Holloway strips the thatch right off and lays new timbers. Then the real work begins. He picks up a spar – a branch of split hazel wood that has been tapered to a point at each end, and twists it in the middle into a V shape. Spars are used to staple the thatch into place.
The thatch itself is made from bundles of water reed, sent from Hungary. Fuel prices and carbon footprinting mean Holloway is encouraging local suppliers to grow wheatgrass, but it's a lengthy process and most of the reed comes from abroad.
Once he's clipped the binding off a bundle he sits the reeds on the roof, with their flower ends facing up and their "butt" end facing the ground, and holds this temporarily in place with iron thatching pins, rather like a hairdresser pulls hair out of the way and clips it into place while working.
Now it's time for a thatcher's primary tool, the legget. It looks like a spade. It has a flat aluminium head but turn it over and you'll see a honeycomb effect punched out of the surface. The grooves catch the butt ends of the reeds as Holloway thumps the legget up against them. He does this in order to marshal the sea of butt ends (known as the coatwork) into as smooth a surface of thatch as possible.
This is called dressing and a well-dressed thatched coat is the pride of the trade.
"I was always told it should look like poured-on custard," says Holloway, now a master thatcher, no less.
After spending a day staring at the coatwork he says he develops "reed blindness". I can see what he means; after an hour gazing close-up, a sea of thatch dances in front of my eyes.
Another particular of a thatcher's tool box is the shearing hook which looks like a left-handed scythe, except it's right-handed and is used to shear the ears off the reeds.
When Holloway has finally, and painstakingly, worked his way up to the ridge of the roof he has to pin the thatch down tightly with some spars. He creates a double layer of thatching at the ridge and covers this with thatching wire (like chicken wire but with a smaller mesh) to protect it from lumbering crows.
Unlike the thatched layer underneath, the flowers of the top layer face downwards and are trimmed with the shearing hook to create a pretty, wavy design. Or to put it in thatching lingo, Holloway creates a "block pattern ridge" using "cross pattern spar work". Now that I can reel that off, I feel it's time to bow out, drop down to ground level and admire the view – without squiffy eyes.
Cool.
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