A concise guide to the craft in Britain & beyond

May 11, 2021 10:39 PM

Welcome to ThatchingInfo.com
The information available here is the result of over three decades of practical experience plus more than a dozen years of research into the history and various working methods employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain… This is a big site, 100 pages of information[,] so please take a while to explore it properly. It’s best to start at the beginning and treat it like a book. But you can just dip in; each page stands on its own and there is a large glossary to help you.
posted by Going To Maine (12 comments total)

And here I thought I’d get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight. Thanks for this!
posted by cali at 11:09 PM on May 11, 2021

I see I'm not the only one who listens to the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast :)
posted by treblekicker at 4:01 AM on May 12, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's a fascinating subject. Years ago, they had a segment on a PBS show (I think it was some special episode of This Old House) where a professional thatcher did repairs on a thatched roof. It was interesting to see the work in action. Thanks for the link.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:17 AM on May 12, 2021

The worst Thatcher was Margaret.
posted by sexyrobot at 6:27 AM on May 12, 2021 [8 favorites]

I ran across an interesting Twitter comment by Madeline Odent (part of a larger interesting-in-its-own-right thread) regarding thatch roofs just a few days ago.

Summarising, for the non-Twitterers: basically, once open-hearth fires went out of common use the thatched roof became functionally redundant, as the smoke from the fire would protect the thatch by killing the insects which inhabited it. Once the smoke was gone birds would interfere with the thatch to get to the insects, and the protective measures now used in modern-day thatches to discourage the birds also cause problems.

vernacular architecture always exists for a REASON and if you try to transplant it out of its proper time and place for the ~aEsTHeTiC~ it will not work properly and will probably become a money pit so like, choose your --core wisely

As the new owner of a century-old house with a fair number of original features I try to keep this sentiment in mind when turning an eye to necessary repairs.
posted by myotahapea at 6:54 AM on May 12, 2021 [3 favorites]

Here's the Mastercrafts episode on thatching (basically, three beginners join a professional thatching crew and learn to thatch with the goal of making it a career)
posted by trig at 7:26 AM on May 12, 2021

Back when I was a mere lad around 1966 I helped the local thatcher on our roof in a rural smallholding deep in the Devon countryside.
It's definitely a well learned skill; all I did was fetch and carry whilest old Mr Reeve applied his craft one early summer. We had had to organise this the past autumn so that he could order his reed to have delivered in time. The thatch pins he coppiced himself.
It was hard dirty work but enjoyable. The gable was covered with chicken mesh to stop pilfering and intrusion by birds. The results lasted for over twenty years with hardly a patch being made.
posted by adamvasco at 8:03 AM on May 12, 2021 [4 favorites]

The worst Thatcher was Margaret.

I thought ThstchingInfo might be a guide on busting unions and privatizing national assets, but it was much more pleasant.
posted by GenjiandProust at 8:47 AM on May 12, 2021

My understanding is this roofing material was born out of necessity due to the extreme scarcity of wood in the highlands? Pretty amazing how something so fragile can be used to make something that lasts so long.

That said, I read the website just aghast at the absurdity of using thatch today. I guess if your house is listed as an artifact you don't have much choice but DANG.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:50 AM on May 12, 2021

There's also an episode of the 1970s Irish crafts series Hands on thatching which can be found here.

(A wonderful series overall if you've never seen it before. Documents the making of all sorts of things, all more or less 'by hand' or methods long since subsumed by modern manufacturing. These also serve as a kind of 'final snapshot' of ways of living and trading, many of which have now disappeared.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 9:26 AM on May 12, 2021 [2 favorites]

I see I’m not the only one who listens to the No Such Thing As A Fish podcast :)

I admit nothing.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:20 AM on May 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

I thought it might be helpful to post about my difficulty navigating the thatchinginfo.com website in the case that it might be helpful to someone else who might, like me, be trying to absorb all of Hangstraw’s amazing content.
Some of the subpages that the author mentions can only be accessed by holding down on the double-down arrow on the right side of each page’s description. I dunno why I found this difficult, as I don’t consider myself a web novice. But this must be a new webpage format for me, and old dog, new tricks...
The website really has a wealth of great photos and very detailed information on the craft of thatching, I can’t wait to read the rest.
posted by GrandPunkRailroad at 8:31 PM on May 12, 2021