Roofers in Fernhurst

Fernhurst sits in wooded Greensand country north of Midhurst, and its older buildings use what the ground offered: local sandstone, red brick and clay tile. Chichester District Council first designated the conservation area in November 1984, and since the National Park came into being in April 2011 it is the South Downs National Park Authority that decides planning matters there. The Authority's appraisal calls clay plain tiles, used both for roofs and as cladding, characteristic of the Wealden buildings in the village. Each plain tile is small, flat and gently cambered, hung by a nib over a batten, and every point of the slope sits under two thicknesses of clay. The covering is long-lived and finicky. One slipped tile is often the first hint that the nail or lath behind it has worn through.

1.1 How old plain tiles fail

Clay tiles rarely give up all at once. Edges flake after hard frosts, nibs (the small lugs that hook each tile over its batten, the thin timber lath nailed across the rafters) snap off, and nails work loose or give out. The face of the roof can look respectable while the fixings behind it have gone. Moss does no harm to a sound tile by itself, but a thick mat keeps water against the clay and hides hairline cracks. Our survey includes lifting one or two tiles along the eaves and part way up each slope, to see the state of the laths and the underlay, the membrane that sits beneath them, and we photograph each fault so you can study it from the ground.

1.2 Matching a village roof, not only mending it

Beside the Green, a repair that keeps the rain out but looks wrong still counts as a poor job. New machine-made tiles are flatter and more even than old hand-moulded ones, so a patch in the wrong colour shows from the road. The usual answer is to take sound tiles from a less visible slope, set them back on the front elevation and fill the rear with a close match. That keeps the street view intact and spreads the new clay where nobody looks. Our pitched roofing page describes how a tiled slope is stripped, re-battened and relaid when patching has run its course.

Tile-hung walls add a second layer to the picture. Hung tiles are clay tiles fixed vertically to cover a wall, and where the roof slope finishes against one, the two must be kept apart by a flashing. The roof tiles and wall tiles may be from different batches and ages, so we deal with the junction first and the colour match second.

A large part of Fernhurst parish is woodland. In the 17th and 18th centuries those woods furnished fuel for ironworks, and the works at North Park, on the Fernhurst and Linchmere border, were revived to cast cannon during the wars of 1762 to 1783. The furnaces are long gone, but the trees have stayed, and they shape what happens to a roof. A house backed by oak or beech takes leaf fall in autumn, shade that keeps a slope damp through winter and branches that scrape tiles in a gale. Few things on a roof are as often overlooked as a gutter packed with leaves.

3.1 Valleys, gutters and the first places water finds

A valley is the internal angle at which two slopes drain into one channel, normally lined in lead. Leaves and moss bank up there first, and a blocked valley sends water sideways under the tiles on either edge. Gutters come next. When they overflow, water runs down the wall face and into the eaves, where the soffit (the board under the overhang) and the fascia (the board along its edge) can rot without anyone seeing. Clearing a gutter and checking its joints is a small job. Ignored, it grows into timber replacement. Our roof inspections and surveys page explains what a photographic survey covers.

3.2 Chimneys that outlast their flashings

Red brick and sandstone stacks tend to outlive the lead that seals them to the roof. Flashing, the strip of lead dressed over the joint between stack and tiles, can lift, split or pull out of its mortar joint, and the water it admits shows as a brown stain on a ceiling long before anyone sees the roof. Our visit takes in the pointing, the flaunching (the mortar bed beneath the pots) and every flashing as one package, because a sound stack with a failed flashing leaks as badly as a cracked one. Pots that lean or crack are noted at the same time, since they are easiest to reset while the stack is open. Our chimney repairs page lists the jobs that usually go together.

Where a woodland house also has a long drive, a narrow lane or no room for a scaffold on the road side, access decides how the work is planned. We look at that on the survey, not on the morning the lorry turns up, because deliveries, skips and the scaffold all need a place to stand. Lopping a branch that brushes the tiles is a tree surgeon's job, and we tell you which limbs to ask about.