Description

'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times

'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional... a beautifully written craftsman's memoir' Daily Mail

Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it. Thatching is one of the world's oldest crafts - an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allen discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon.

Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan's 5,000-year-old thatching tradition. Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.

 

Paperback
Publication: 5 Jun 2025, Profile Books Ltd
ISBN: 9781788167444

Extent: 304 pages

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On The Roof: A Thatcher's Journey by Tom Allan (PRE-ORDER)

    'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times 'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular... Read more

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        Description

        'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times

        'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional... a beautifully written craftsman's memoir' Daily Mail

        Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it. Thatching is one of the world's oldest crafts - an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allen discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon.

        Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian refugee who found peace among the seagrass roofs of Denmark, to one of the first women to master Japan's 5,000-year-old thatching tradition. Eye-opening, beautifully told and revealing a tradition hand-shaped over centuries, On the Roof is a story of how we live with the land and how we have chosen to treat it.

         

        Paperback
        Publication: 5 Jun 2025, Profile Books Ltd
        ISBN: 9781788167444

        Extent: 304 pages

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