South Milton village, tucked in a fold of Devon hill, is normally sheltered from the wind. But there’s scant protection from today’s easterly, which rushes down the lane, twisting the last leaves from the thorn hedges and piercing my two layers of fleece.
Perched on the back of a pickup, I’m trimming the eaves on a thatched cottage, the last job in re-roofing it with Turkish water reed. It’s hard work that leaves your forearms burning: Turkish reed tends to be tough, and this stuff is like iron. Even on a morning like this, it doesn’t take me long to get warm.
Trimming the eaves with hand shears instead of “dressing” them – knocking the ends into place with the thatcher’s most essential tool, the flat-headed drift or leggett – is a quirk of the local trade. When imported water reed started to replace combed wheat (a softer material) around 30 years ago, Devon thatchers kept on using their shears, “to make our water reed work look more like wheat reed”, as Alan Prince, the now retired thatcher who taught me the trade, remembers. It looks better, too, he says. Though some thatchers now use a petrol hedge trimmer (easier on the arms), it doesn’t produce such a clean finish.
As I cut the curve around an “eyebrow” window, shearing the reed on the diagonal to leave the ends pointed like quills, I think back to my first attempt at this most conspicuous job, on a section of eaves on a busy Devon pub. I spent hours laboriously snipping along the line I was trying to follow (by eye – no string line allowed), the rest of the world reduced to a white blur. Six years later I work faster, but it’s still a job to take time over – you’ll be living with the results for 20 or 30 years.
Done, I sweep down the lane, and the offcuts swirl in the draught of a passing courier van (these lanes were sized for horse and cart, not today’s transport). I gather up the last bright gold reed-ends from the road, watched over by a pair of jackdaws perched on a chimney pot, huddling together for warmth.
