The New Murrey and Blue blog

A fond memory from my childhood is an early-1950s holiday spent with my maternal great-aunt in the Dorset village of East Chaldon (aka Chaldon Herring). She and my great-uncle lived in one of a short terrace of thatched cottages and I had a bedroom (third or fourth from the camera in the Google Maps photograph below) with a window that peeped out through the base of the thatch. It was high summer, sunny and warm, and the roses were in full bloom. One, a yellow climber, clambered right up to and around my window. That bedroom smelled wonderful.

In the above Google Maps image, the end one (not my great-aunt’s) closest to the camera still has a rose around the bedroom window and if you go here https://www.dogfriendlycottages.co.uk/properties/united-kingdom/england/south-west/dorset/purbeck-district/chaldon-herring/exquisite-east-chaldon-cottage-s86459 you can see inside it. My word, I can promise you it wasn’t like that in my great-aunt’s day. Back then hers was probably still as it had been in the 19th century!

That holiday was my first experience of actually staying in a typical English thatched cottage, and the memory has remained fresh all this time.

These roofs have been part of our history for millennia. They were here when the Romans arrived and still here when Richard III was king. They’ve always been here, and I hope they still are when the next millennium arrives.

We all love them, but now it seems that these beautiful roofs are in danger. See here https://www.countrylife.co.uk/property/thatch-under-threat-poor-harvests-labour-shortages-and-war-are-causing-the-industry-to-struggle-272169. This Country Life article explains:

“….A Historic England (HE) report released this week, following another last year, outlines some of the issues. Thatchers face a shortage of supplies due, in part, to poor harvests in unpredictable weather and labour shortages since Brexit. Unreliable vintage machinery is the only type available (combine harvesters, which took over in the 1950s, prioritise the yield of wheat), with hard-to-source spare parts. The war in Ukraine has made things worse, too, as 97% of the water reed we’ve used in recent years has been imported, some from Eastern Europe….”

Who on earth would have thought that the war in Ukraine would affect our thatched roofs? I do hope that this dreadful shortage can be resolved, and that the ancient craft of thatching can flourish to the full. It would be awful if thatches were replaced by plain old tiles!

Here is an example of how lovely our thatched cottages can be: