Roofers in Hailey, Oxfordshire

The village appraisal dates its period houses and cottages to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and says they use local grey oolitic limestone, laid as coursed rubble. Above those thick walls the appraisal singles out stone slate as the roof covering, with a bundle-thatch outbuilding at Poffley End the only thatch in the village. Each stone is thick and weighty, graded so the large ones sit low and the small ones high, and pinned to the battens with pegs. The faults are rarely dramatic: a peg lets go, a stone slips, moss holds water against a joint. Judging whether a slope wants a handful of stones rehung or a complete strip and rebuild is the main call we make on these houses.

Hailey's earliest surviving structure is the Old Manor House, which dates from the late fifteenth century, began as a hall house and was remodelled around 1600. Gigley Farm, Hailey Manor and Downhill Farmhouse are among the larger houses, and they use ashlar, the smooth dressed stone, rather than rubble. Roofs on buildings like these are large, steep and often broken up by gables, chimney stacks and valleys, so a leak may start at a flashing or a valley instead of in the open slope. They also sit on old timbers that have moved over centuries, which is why a look at the structure from inside the loft is part of every visit to a house of this age.

The Church of St John Evangelist was designed in 1866 by Clapton Crabbe Rolfe, whose father was vicar of Hailey, and it gives the village a Victorian landmark among its older stone. Newer building in and around Hailey carries whatever covering was chosen at the time: clay or concrete tile, slate, and flat or low-pitched roofs on porches, garages and kitchen extensions. The appraisal notes virtually no red brick in the village, so a tiled roof sits against a limestone background and its colour matters when we match a repair. Those later roofs bring familiar faults: cracked tiles, loose ridges, tired felt and failing flat-roof coverings.