Reading. The thatcher (Int)

The thatcher

On sunny days, as you sit in the office staring out of the window, ignoring the great pile of paperwork in front of you, do you sometimes wonder whether working with your hands in the great outdoors might suit you a little better? I know I do. That’s why I left my London desk recently to meet up with twenty-five-year-old Andy Lyons, a fit, athletic, suntanned guy who works as a thatcher in the villages of southern England. Thatching is a traditional craft, which, after a century of decline, has seen a revival in recent years, and I wanted to find out what it was all about and what had attracted him, along with a growing number of young men and women, to the job.

If you’ve ever visited a small English village you can’t have missed the ancient cottages with their beautiful old roofs, which make the places seem so historic and timeless. The roofs are made of thousands of dry strips of water reeds, all packed tightly together. As you can probably imagine, maintaining these roofs is an enormous challenge, and that’s where Andy comes in. He spends his working life up a ladder in all weathers putting together thatched roofs.

I caught up with him in a little village in Sussex, a village sleepy enough and pretty enough to be pictured on the lid of a chocolate box. I asked him what he did in his job and what he loved about it. Unsurprisingly, what I discovered was that the job varied from season to season. ‘During the summer, I’m up on the roofs most of the time,’ said Andy. ‘It’s all change in the colder months. Then we have to cut the water reed, a thick type of grass which grows in rivers, and gather it together in bundles to dry it. That makes great thatch.’

Andy went on to tell me that the thatch he used differed from that further inland, where different grasses were used, and that his personal area of expertise was in restoring older, more historic houses rather than in making new roofs. ‘I rarely get to work on anything new,’ said Andy. ‘We do have some thatchers in our company whose expertise lies in making new roofs on houses that have just been built, which is really difficult to do. I enjoy learning new aspects of the craft every day – it’s not easy, so there’s always something new to learn – and of course, being in the open air in the summer is fantastic. If I were in a typical job, I’d have to work inside all day and I wouldn’t be so fit or have such a good suntan!’