The Old Thatch

How to thatch an old cottage.
First select your medium:- straw (combed wheat reed or long straw); rushes, heather, water reeds, stubble, marram grass, potatoes (yes! But we're talking the stalky part not the fat bit you eat! and it's put on root end down); bracken (but not good this one because users just didn't know all those years ago that bracken is carcinogenic when its seeding and that's when it's used for thatching and again it's stalk, not leaf, down!), turf, and of course tiles.

Tiles?
The word thatching comes to us from all the way back from when they couldn't spell, you know, when there were funny letters such as 'thorn' and 'eth' which looked like 'P' and 'd' (but both of which came after 'T' and were pronounced as a sort of 'th') and it meant then and still does, simply ... 'a roof covering' but with words looking like: Peccean (see, nuts!) and Pacchen, Peahte, Pehte and finally came through to us as Thecche, Thetche and Thacche and Thack when they had done some homework on their letters and maybe a few crosswords for practice.

From way back in the dim and distant and this is where my memory lets me down - there have survived building receipts for houses and castles where the roof was ... 'thatched with tiles' (1683-M. Mackaile in Macfarlane ... affordeth only slates for thatching of houses) The other letter, the 'd' ,survives in the olde word we use today: 'Ye' ... as in ... 'Ye olde Peahte' ..so how is it done?

Well, you get your material and if it's straw you cut the strings on the bolting (a bundle tied up by the threshing machine) and throw the loose straw into a heap stack, all dry and loose like and mixed up and then you thoroughly wet it down (it's at this point that most thatchers start to lose interest).

Then you adopt a bending stance with one leg fo' ards and proceed to draw out and pull towards yourself small handfuls of straw and lay them at your feet whist developing serious backache. Each pull is placed next to and between the last one and your feet so that you slowly work yourself backwards and around the heap leaving a trail of straightened straw about 4 inches thick in the middle and about 2 to 3 feet wide. This straw is then further straightened and compacted whilst on your knees, further exacerbating the backache, and finally you stand up, if you can, gathered it together in about as much as will fill the length from your armpit to the elbow and call it 'a Yealm of straw' (Old English for an 'Armful' of straw)

I guess this is where the Scots start to lose interest as I'm sure you had your own Gaelic term for it but I don't know it. (I do know I'm a 'Tuagh' so there...ugh hu!(I think!) but that's my extent of knowledge of the Gael)

So now we've got a heap of yealms all tied up in 6's sand 7's down on the floor, a tatty old thatched roof, up in the air and a bad back somewhere in-between. At this point any self-respecting thatcher goes home and rests up for a week or two or three until the owner, tearing his hair out with frustration, comes beating the door down - but that's another story.

So upon ascending the ladder with a bunch of six or seven yealms; a yoke to hold it on the roof; a headrake or thatchers hammer; some daggs (sheep shears) and a knife; a bundle of spars (or spits, spiks, broarches, pegs, twists or goosenecks - hazel thatching pegs depending on where you live) and some liggers, sways, runners or straw bond to hold the thatch down, you start to thatch the roof.

Lets suppose we are thatching an old straw roof with new straw. If so then we work from the eaves up fitting the bottles first (a plug of tied straw looking like a bottle) to give the thatch some 'kick' using the thatching pegs shoved through into the old thatch beneath; then the brow course also pegged on (first course above the bottles) and up the roof in a narrow stulch (or vertical strip) of roughly one out-stretched, arms-length width.

(There is an old thatchers saying '... that a good thatcher always finishes his stulch' meaning that one never finishes half way up a roof but always carries the strip of finished new thatch right up to the ridge. (there's also another about leaving till tomorrow what should be done today...)

The thatching continues on for ever an ever an ever with one stulch after another until the thatcher is driven right round the roof, and the bend, ... so I just won't bore you with any more

Instead I'll relate a few noteworthy incidents from my time as a thatcher, such as when my boss fell through the roof into a locked wardrobe and had to be let out by the wee wifey.

....How I plugged a running hosepipe down a soil-vent-pipe and forgot about it whilst I carried on thatching and it slowly and inexorably filled the already straw blocked pipe all the way up the house side and then it backed up the toilet system and finally flooded all the contents into the bathroom and through the floor and ceiling into the kitchen!

....Or how I put my foot through a roof precisely above an open attic trapdoor sending barraloads of muck 'n' straw in a blackstorm down through two storeys and all over the whitest of exotic white bed linen below. .

....The dear old lady I did a favour for and patched her roof for a tenner only to be told for my pains over a cup of tea and a cake that ' ...well of course I'd have had a real thatcher if I could have afforded one'

....The tiny room we discovered deep within a thatch next to a chimney in the attics that was 'stuffed', absolutely packed, with horses hooves!!

Finally, that my son took over the business - thank god (and made more of it than I would ever have guessed) and now thatches all the major film sets including; 'Braveheart' (Mel Gibson), '10th Kingdom' (Rutger Hauer), 'Sleepy Hollows' & 'The Man Who Cried' (both Johnny Depp), 'Chocolat' (Juliette Binoche - is it?), 'Band of Brothers, (Private Ryan follow-on, not yet released) and a medieval 'Knights Tale' being made at the moment in Prague, just to drop a few.

Well that's how Ye Olde Roof is Thatched but the very best part of it all, for me, was doing it on Coll. I cannot recall finding such a haven of nice people.

Ach weell!

JW