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Beacon Villages Journal
'Fful sooty was hir bour and eke hir halle'
(Chaucer, The Nun's Priest's Tale)
Church House Archeology
Thursday 18th November 2004
Following on from obtaining a Heritage Lottery Fund grant towards the cost of restoring the South Tawton 15th Century Church House, the first steps to re-thatching, an archeological investigation by medieval thatching expert John Letts, were put into action. Accompanied by David Youle, the Project Manager and Cynthia Gaskell Brown, Heritage Consultant, John set about his work.
He chose the area that appeared to have the oldest, undisturbed thatch, on the front western side of the room and began by taking measurements and making notes to his tape recorder.
Then, having identified a particular location with indications of some fine rye stalks, he began to take his samples and float them down to the floor below.
When he had sufficient samples to take back for statistical and possibly DNA analysis, John came down his ladder and took a preliminary look at the material that could have been in the thatch for 500 years.
By counting the nodes on the stalks, John was able to make an initial estimate that the crop that grew this was probably in the region of over six feet (two metres) tall. He was also delighted to find some grain for DNA testing.
I have no photo but he was less than delighted to find that his hat, which he had left on the table underneath, was covered in 15th Century soot!
Before going on to his next task, John explained that he had found two mysteries at Church House. The first was that, with a few 'modern' exceptions, there were no ties (like the one in the photo to the right) holding the Church House thatch to the woodwork, something very rare in his professional experience.
The second concerned what appears to be green paint or some kind of preservative (see right two photos) which required some sort of explanation.
After lunch, it was time to unravel another of Church House's secrets. On the first floor on the eastern side of the building a smaller room had been partitioned off and the loft area above it sealed at some time in the past. A small hole had been previously made at roof level in this partition and now John intended to slightly enlarge this and crawl through to investigate the thatch at that end.
Armed first with a saw (to enlarge the hole), then a torch (to look in) and finally with a broom (to remove some medieval cobwebs), John then took off his sweater to make himself thinner and crawled through.
He offered to pass down down the skeleton he found but everyone declined. It would appear that the smoke blackening does exist in this part of the roof but not as extensively as in the western end of the building. There was probably much to interest an archeologist but the layman only remarked a great many dead butterflies in the cobwebs and a few fat spiders.
David got up to have a look but we must all await the results of the various tests etc. and wait to hear from John on his next visit.

This is only a sample of the material concerning the Church House restoration. It is intended to put much detail of the feasibility study and the restoration progress on the Church House web site, for those with a deeper interest in the subject.

http://www.thechurchhouse.org.uk

Note the terrible repair!
Did you know a bomb dropped on the village in the second world war?