The Feud Inside England’s Community of Master Home Thatchers

If you were buying a house in a notoriously rainy country, would you choose one with a roof made of straw?

Across England, buyers are paying extraordinary sums to do exactly that. Thatched homes, once associated with peasant life, are now among the most coveted properties in a country where nostalgia for a distant and mythologized past runs deep — a storybook landscape of shires, low beams and misty sheep meadows. Last month, the actress Sienna Miller re-listed her thatched cottage in Buckinghamshire for £1.75 million ($2.35 million). So enduring is the appeal that Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of Virgin Group, hired British thatchers to roof his Caribbean home.

But beneath the layers of thatch, a feud is simmering among England’s tiny fraternity of so-called “master thatchers.”

For the most ardent traditionalists, the only true thatch is “long straw” — typically cereal straw, like wheat, which is threshed to remove the grain — believed by historians to be England’s original roof. Then there’s water reed, the more durable alternative that is increasingly imported from abroad.

For the master thatcher Stephen Letch, the difference is unmistakable. The problem is that for almost everyone else it’s undetectable — which is one reason long-straw roofs are going extinct.

“There’s 20 or 30 long-straw thatchers left in all of England,” said Mr. Letch, 66, who has spent much of his life trying to preserve this dying art. “We’re the last and we know we’re the last — and we know that once we’re gone, those skills will be lost.”

On an afternoon in May, standing beside a 438-year-old cottage in the village of Redgrave, in the county of Suffolk, Mr. Letch ran his rough hand over the edge of a roof he had installed himself. “Do you see how it looks like it’s been poured?” he asked.

Mr. Letch was pointing out the fluid texture of the dried thatch blanketing the house — a soft, seamless look, as though a thick golden liquid had oozed over the cottage and its eaves. This is the signature of long-straw thatch, part of a roofing tradition in Britain believed to date back to the Bronze Age.

Long before Britain was stitched together by a railway, roofs were made from whatever grew nearby, like heather in the northern highlands and reed near bogs and waterways. Overwhelmingly, though, most areas of the country used straw, a byproduct of the wheat grown to make bread, according to historians. It’s a lightweight material that keeps homes well insulated in the summer heat and the winter cold, but it is also flammable, attracts insects and the spiders that feed on them, and requires costly maintenance.

According to one assessment, 90 percent of thatched roofs in England and Wales were made of straw before 1800, with the remaining share split between water reed and grasses, like heather. Now that percentage has been inverted, as more and more houses are re-thatched with the more durable reed. But it’s not sourced from the local river — much of it is shipped from Eastern Europe and China.

“We do get asked the question: Well, what is the value of it?” Mr. Letch said of the long straw. “Tradition,” he answered, before dropping his voice: “But you can’t see the tradition because it all looks the same.”

History sits front and center in the English villages that still have thatched cottages. The stretch of Suffolk where Mr. Letch learned his trade is name-checked in the “Domesday Book,” a survey of all of the land in England commissioned in 1085 by William the Conqueror. Nearly a millennium later, Led Zeppelin made a 19th-century thatcher the embodiment of English folklore on the iconic cover of its fourth album.

And yet, a country obsessed with conserving its architectural past has quietly allowed many of its oldest roofs to disappear. “It’s mad to say that we are preserving a vernacular material, but importing it from China,” said Jo Cox, a buildings historian who wrote a history of thatching for England’s historic preservation body.

It’s not hard to see why water reed has won out. It lasts longer — up to 70 years, versus 40 years for long straw, according to Julia Shelley, editor of The Thatcher’s Standard, the publication of the National Society of Master Thatchers. And it’s much easier to source and to install.

“You can pick up the phone and say, ‘I need 2,000 bunches of reeds,’ and they’ll turn up next week,” said the master thatcher Bodkin Willows, 38, while it can take up to a year to source the wheat for a long-straw roof.

The reed arrives from overseas in bundles that can go straight onto a roof. Long straw, by contrast, requires a preparation so elaborate that it has its own archaic vocabulary: Straw must be “gabled,” soaked in water and sorted, before being arranged in “yealms,” and pinned into place with “broaches” or “spars” made from hazel sticks that have been sharpened into staples.

Then there’s the training required to become a long-straw thatcher, which is so arduous it resembles a hazing ritual.

When he was a 19-year-old apprentice, Mr. Letch learned to “windshield” a bucket of water onto the straw — a technique of throwing the water so that it moistens the fibers but doesn’t soak them. On freezing mornings, he’d use a hammer to crack the ice that had formed over the bucket, then dunk his hands in the frigid water for 45 seconds, “until they were like red hot pokers,” he said.

When he made a mistake, his mentor struck his numbed hands with a hazel broach — or stick. “It’s very Neolithic, isn’t it?” Mr. Letch chuckled.

To long-straw traditionalists, the punishing apprenticeship is part of the point. “It teaches the apprentice the values,” said Mr. Letch. “Perseverance.”

But the very qualities that made long-straw thatching so demanding also made it vulnerable in a modernizing England. The demise of long-straw thatching began in the mid-1800s, when railways allowed building materials like shingles and water reed to be transported across the country. By the early 1900s, straw roofs were being stripped and re-thatched in reed.

One reason was birds. Traces of grain left in straw attracted sparrows that burrowed into roofs. The birds were considered such a nuisance that churches offered a bounty — a halfpenny for every sparrow head, according to parish records collected by Mr. Letch.

Wire netting, invented in the 1840s, finally solved the problem but was initially so expensive that it doubled the cost of a straw roof. Long straw acquired a reputation for being more fragile, more labor-intensive and more expensive — a perception that persists today, even as the cost of netting has fallen to around 5 percent of the total bill.

According to the master thatcher Christopher Essex — one of the craftsmen who was flown to the Caribbean to care for Mr. Branson’s roof — water reed costs around £6 per bundle and covers around one foot of a roof, versus straw, which can cost as much as £16 for a bundle that covers around two feet, he said. Covering an average cottage can run $40,000 to $50,000, not including the periodic replacement of the ridge, the topmost section of the roof, which needs to be replaced every decade, or the higher insurance premiums tied to fire risk.

“It’s a known fact — water reed lasts longer than long straw,” said Mr. Essex, who dismissed concerns about imported reed as out of touch.

To outsiders, the dispute may seem absurd. Britain has only around 60,000 thatched homes left — 0.2 percent of its housing stock. But among England’s roughly 800 thatchers, the reed-versus-straw debate provokes enormous emotion and occasional fisticuffs. A conference in Oxford in the late 1990s nearly devolved into a brawl, said Ms. Cox, recalling how the mild-mannered academic chairing the event threatened to adjourn if the feuding thatchers didn’t settle down.

Part of it is temperament. The work — often done alone, high atop a ladder — tends to draw artisans with an independent streak. “I’ll use the word ‘cantankerous,’” said Mr. Essex, describing at least four brawls he’s witnessed. “We know our own minds and we stick to things.” And in a small trade, disputes over how to thatch can become disputes over who gets the next job and the fear that “you’re stealing the bird out of my mouth,” he said.

In recent decades, some towns and villages passed rules calling for “like-for-like” replacements of thatch, but by then water reed had won out.

The distinction is mostly lost on the thousands of owners of thatched homes. A spokeswoman for Savills, the agency selling Sienna Miller’s home, was unsure which type of thatch covered the actress’s 16th-century cottage.

Corinne and Martin Price, who bought their thatched cottage in the village of Saul nearly three years ago for £485,000 ($655,000), also couldn’t say for certain which thatch they have. “As far as I am aware it’s straw, but I could be corrected on that,” said Ms. Price, 53.

It seems beside the point when they consider the romance of living in a house that was built in 1410.

“I 100 percent fell in love with it,” she said, describing the house as almost like a living being. The roof, she said, gives the house a feeling that modern homes never could — “warm,” “cozy” and especially “organic,” as though nature had not been shut out entirely, but was woven into the home itself.