. . . are fascinating. We find ourselves always looking across the tops of buildings: admiring clay tiles, brickwork, chimney pots, and the rest. But thatch?!? Just before we came here Ellie's friend Kate loaned us bootleg videos of a wonderful BBC-Wales production "Tales from the Green Valley," the story of four archaeologists living a year as Elizabethans in an up-country Welsh stone cottage. Every episode focused on the labours of the season, and we were fascinated by the thatching of a cowbarn.
So Saturday we chanced upon the village of Aston Magna in The Cotswolds: it seems as though thatched roofs and topiary are the specialties of some of these rural nooks. As we made our way down the narrow lane past some scaffolding, we found that master thatchers were at work on one of the cottages (dated 1713, I believe). Having been shown by the BBC how it was done from scratch in Ye Olden Dayes, it was intensely interesting to see how modern craftsmen set up to interweave the new with the old, very likely using the same bundling and stitching techniques as the Elizabethans.
A return to the general topic of rooflines brings me to chimneys and chimney pots and chimney corbelling. This picture is not from Harry Potter or Walt Disney; it reflects the real engineering sense and sensibilities of rural people in the village of Mill End, on the River Thames.
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