Roofers in Avebury

By the early eighteenth century the village had spread into the stone circle and along the high street, and the centre was crowded with small cottages, some with sarsen walling. The county history records thatch on Westbrook farmhouse and a brick chequered front at Bannings farmhouse, so even a short walk shows how mixed the coverings are. Old cottages like these move gently as the timbers age, and a roof laid for a lime-built wall does not always tolerate a hard repair. Our survey looks at the wall tops, the rafter feet and the pitch of each slope, and we work out how much of the existing covering can stay in place. In a cottage that has been extended and rebuilt across the centuries, the loft often tells the story better than the street does, and we photograph what we find up there.

Avebury Manor was largely reconstructed around 1600 and refitted in the mid eighteenth century, and the National Trust owns a sixteenth-century pigeon house and a late seventeenth-century barn. The parish church of St James, with its eleventh-century nave and fifteenth-century tower, was restored between 1878 and 1884. Big heritage buildings like these are looked after by their owners and specialist conservation architects, and the lead, valleys and gutters on them need regular attention. What matters for neighbouring houses is that the roofline of the whole village is read as one: ridge heights, eaves lines and colour of covering all affect how a new roof sits beside old ones. A bright new tile next to weathered neighbours is the kind of detail people notice for years.

Cottages inside the Circle were demolished under the preservation scheme, and council houses were built north of South Street in the late 1930s and after the Second World War. Those homes have simpler roofs: regular pitches, plain gables, brick chimney stacks and, often, a replacement covering laid in the later twentieth century. The typical faults are ordinary ones. Cement at the verges cracks, ridge tiles lift, flashings around the stacks fail, and moss holds moisture on shaded slopes. Because these roofs are easy to read, a precise repair is often possible, and the quote can say which tiles and which joints need work and which do not. Gutters on these homes are checked on the same visit, because a leaking joint can soak the brick below the eaves.