Roofing in Corfe Castle

Stone slate slopes. Purbeck stone hung in diminishing courses, the biggest at the eaves and the smallest at the ridge. Individual slates are lifted and re-hung; whole slopes are stripped and relaid where the oak pegs or the nails have gone rather than the stone. Sound stone is sorted and put back, and only delaminated pieces are made up from salvage, which is why a stone roof takes longer to programme than a tiled one. We do not point a stone roof and we do not seal one. Stone is several times heavier than a concrete tile, so putting it back on a slope re-covered in something lighter years ago is a structural question about the rafters before it is a roofing one.

Not every roof here is stone. The later cottages and the twentieth century houses at the edges carry plain clay tile, natural slate and concrete interlocking tile, and those get the ordinary treatment: storm damage made good, ridge and verge screwed down under BS 5534 rather than re-bedded in mortar that will crack again.

Thatch, which we will not take on. There is thatch in the village. We do not touch it and we will tell you so. What we will do is the leadwork, the flashing and the rainwater goods where a stone or tiled slope abuts a thatched one, a junction that leaks far more often than the thatch itself.

Older slopes here often have no membrane at all and were torched with lime on the underside instead, and some slate sits on sarking boards. Perished felt, soft batten ends and a wet rafter foot are what we look for from inside first, because the strip is priced on what is under the covering. A village with a hundred and thirty four listed entries has a lot of stacks, and they are the commonest source of the leaks we chase: flaunching, flashings, soakers, valleys and abutments in code rated lead cut so it can move without splitting. Cement fillets in place of lead are a false economy and we replace them.

Rear additions and outbuildings come in felt, GRP fibreglass or EPDM rubber, with the deck checked before the falls, upstands and outlet. Cast iron gutters are usually worth repairing rather than ripping off, and moss on stone is not automatically a fault and never gets pressure washed. On a building whose appearance is controlled, the roof space is often the only place you can genuinely improve things, and Approved Document L sets the standard a renovated roof is expected to reach.

No rate per square metre. Access is the awkward part of working in the village: lanes are narrow, the A351 runs straight through it and parking pressure is real, so where a scaffold and a skip can stand is settled before anything is priced, and a platform on the footway is a licence from the highway authority rather than a favour. Deliveries get sequenced so a stone lorry comes once. The work at height rules are why the platform is a priced line. Chimneys, valleys and abutments are priced one at a time. Ask whether the scaffold is in and who pays for the skip.

More than a hundred entries in this village are listed, and the conservation area covers nearly all of what is left. That is a much higher proportion than anywhere else we work, so the sensible assumption at a Corfe Castle address is that something applies until you have checked, rather than the other way round.

What it changes in practice is the specification, not just the paperwork. A listed roof has to go back in the same material, laid the same way, with the same laps and courses, and listed building consent covers the back of the building as much as the front.

That rules out the substitutions people are sometimes offered: a lighter tile in place of stone, a plastic dry verge on a stone gable, cement where lead should be. It also adds time at the front of a job, because matched stone gets sourced rather than ordered. Tell us the address when you ring and we will establish the status before we quote.