A01=Tom Allan
Author_Tom Allan
Category=WFV
Category=WN
cottagecore
eq_bestseller
eq_crafts-hobbies
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
hedgemaking
heritage crafts
of thorn and briar
roofing
thatching
The Old Ways Robert MacFarlane
Traditional Woodland Crafts Ray Tabor
Why We Make Things and Why It Matters Peter Korn
Product details
- ISBN 9781788167444
- Weight: 250g
- Dimensions: 128 x 196mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2025
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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'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.
Tom Allan has worked as a thatcher in South Devon since 2012. Before this he planted hedges in the Scottish Borders and worked for a London publishing house. He writes about the natural world for the Guardian's Country Diary column, and has written on travel and the environment for the Financial Times, Guardian, the Earth Island Journal, British Wildlife Magazine, and others.
