Roofers in Lea, Wiltshire

St Giles' keeps a fifteenth-century west tower, while the rest of the church was rebuilt and enlarged in 1878, so one building carries two very different ages of roof. A Victorian nave roof and a medieval tower parapet fail in different ways. The tower is a matter of lead, drainage and masonry; the nave is a matter of battens, nails and the valleys between pitches. Houses close to a church of this kind are often older than their roofs, which have been covered afresh at some point in their lives. The question at survey is how much of the original timber still carries the load, and whether the roof was ever stripped back to the rafters or simply patched over. Where roofs sit under tall trees, leaf litter and moss trap damp along the eaves, and a gutter that looks tidy from the lane can be full behind the fascia.

Lea shares its parish with Garsdon and the hamlet of Cleverton, and Garsdon Manor is Grade II* listed: a fourteenth-century house with seventeenth-century additions. Buildings with that sort of layered history are a roofer's lesson in joins. Where a later wing meets an earlier one there is a valley, an abutment or a chimney stack, and each is a spot where rain can get past the covering. Roofs of this age and listing grade are repaired in the covering they were built with, using methods that leave the historic timbers alone, and a change of material is never ours to decide alone. Farmhouses and barn conversions in the parish raise the same questions on a smaller scale, usually with a long run of ridge and several gable ends to keep watertight.

The Woodbridge Brook runs through the parish and the Charlton Stream marks its western edge, and low ground near water tends to hold damp air and moss. Zion Chapel was built by Calvinistic Methodists around 1808, rebuilt in 1861 and still in use in 2018. A rebuild of that date is the kind of building where we would expect natural slate and check rather than assume. Small cottages, outbuildings and extensions along the lanes usually include a porch, lean-to or garage with a flat or shallow roof. Those age faster than the main roof and tend to be the first thing to leak, so we look at them on the same visit rather than leaving them for the next storm.