Roofers in Alfold

Alfold's church is where its roofing story starts. The county history for Surrey, published in 1911 and now online, describes St Nicholas with walls of Bargate stone rubble, a bell-turret and spire clad in oak, and a timber bell-frame and spire framework dated to about 1500. It also records that the chancel, aisle and porch roofs were covered with Horsham slabs. That account is more than a century old, so it tells you what the builders used rather than what sits on the roof this afternoon. It does show how different the materials can be on one small group of buildings: rubble walls, stone slabs and split oak, each with its own way of failing.

1.1 What Horsham slabs are and how they behave

Horsham slabs are thick stone slates, riven from sandstone and laid in diminishing courses. That means the largest slabs sit at the eaves and each course above is smaller, ending with the lightest at the ridge. They are far heavier than clay or concrete tile, so the timbers underneath do real work, and a house or outbuilding carrying them should never be re-covered in something lighter or heavier without someone checking the structure first. Traditionally each slab hangs from a batten (the narrow timber lath a covering is fixed to) by a peg through a hole near its head. When a slab slips, the cause is more often a rotted peg or batten than the stone itself, so the sound repair is to lift the course, renew the fixing and relay the same slab. Our Horsham stone roofing page explains how a stone slate roof is stripped, sorted and relaid.

1.2 Wooden spires and where our work meets them

A timber-clad spire is a specialist's craft, and nobody should climb one on the strength of a general roofing quote. What a general roofer can usefully look at is the ground below: the lead flashings (strips of lead dressed where a roof butts a wall or tower), the valley between nave and aisle where two slopes meet and shed water into a lead-lined channel, and the gutters and downpipes. Those are the places where a stone church usually lets water in first. Consent follows the building. Where a parish church is Church of England and in regular use, it sits under the Church's own faculty system rather than listed building consent, so a parish takes a roof job through that route before any scaffold goes up. Houses and cottages nearby follow the ordinary rules, with listed building consent added where a home is listed.

The 1911 account calls Alfold a rural parish of about 2,974 acres lying on Wealden clay and largely wooded, with glass-houses once standing in Sydney Wood. Aubrey saw the graves of French glass-makers in the churchyard, though the trade was already extinct in his day. The woods are still there and they shape the work. Trees overhang roofs, drop leaves and needles into gutters, and shade slopes that then stay damp, so the repair list on a house here often starts with the roofline rather than the covering.

3.1 Roofs on old oak frames

Alfold House is half-timbered and early 16th century, and the parish has other timbered farms and cottages. A roof on a timber frame is not a roof on a straight, rigid box. Rafters sag, ridges dip and walls lean, so tiles that were laid a long time ago sit in waves and a modern, perfectly flat set of battens can look wrong beside them. We look for the cause of a dip before deciding whether it is cosmetic, and a ruler along the rafter line often says more than a first glance from the lane. Sound old rafters can often be kept and the battens and covering renewed over them. If a timber has rotted at the wall plate (the horizontal timber the rafters rest on), that is repaired first, as a covering laid over rotten wood only hides the problem for a while. Bats and nesting birds are protected, and old timber roofs are where they settle, so work pauses and advice is taken if we meet either.

3.2 Gutters, moss and the shade of the trees

Where a roof lives under oaks, the plain jobs matter most. Gutters need clearing, moss on shaded slopes holds water against the tile, and a blocked valley can send rain over its edge and into the wall below. Our roof inspections and surveys page explains the photographed check we do before quoting. On a farmhouse with several roof levels and a long run of old gutter, the survey often finds one cause behind several stains, and fixing that one cause is the smallest job that properly works. Chimneys, porch roofs and lean-to outshuts get the same scrutiny, since a roof that has been extended over the centuries has more joints between old and new than a single plain slope, and each joint is a place for water to find a way in. A scaffold on a village lane needs a licence from the county council as highway authority, so the plan allows for that wait, and ask your roofer who is lodging it.