'Tis the season for roof repairs! We suspected a residual leak high up on the east elevation was coming from a box gutter above the (collapsed) oriel window. This rather vertiginous image looking down the sharp pitch of the castle's roof, shows the location of the gutter in question behind a section of the lead covered stone parapet which extends all the way round the castle.
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| box gutter in poor condition - don't look down! |
The gutter was indeed shot - here exposed is the "wall head" a wooden beam on top of the wall to which the rafters attach. You can see that due to the leaky gutter, it has been wet for a few decades too many and is now an inappropriate shape.
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| rotten wall head in situ |
The wall head has been removed here - fortunately the roof of the castle is over-engineered to the max and obligingly stays in position.
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| wall head removed |
New wall head in place:
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| new wall head in place |
Box gutter is fixed on the outside - yes you can look down now!
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| repaired box gutter |
It is likely that the box gutter will have to fixed-up like this all the way round the castle and this is ongoing work. Fortunately, this (fingers crossed) is the only one which is actively leaking and so had to be sorted ASAP.
These photos of the roof are fantastic. Great to note the human scale in the 'before' picture, I never realised the dormer heads were quite so huge!
ReplyDeleteThe scale of the castle is quite deceptive. Even s job which appears to be small, turns out, by all normal criteria to be monumental. One morning, I decided to cut the yew hedge at the front of the castle - this is a morning's job right? Wrong! This was four solid weekends with a chainsaw!
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