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Over the last twenty five years there has been much repair work carried out on the stone and flint work of St. Mary’s walls, but the largest single item left in need of restoration was the roof. The nave and south aisle needed re-leading (the existing sheets were too large, resulting in excessive thermal expansion and contraction, thus causing cracks to appear which allowed the ingress of rain water) and the chancel and vestry roofs required re-tiling.
Work began in June 2001 with the entire building, except for the tower, covered in scaffolding and a corrugated-iron roof. As soon as the lead and boarding were removed from the nave it was discovered that they had been acting like a stressed skin, keeping the rafters in place. Many common rafters were not touching the walls at either end (see below), they were merely balanced across the beams. The nave itself now had to be filled with scaffolding to support the roof timbers that so easily could have collapsed. A structural engineer was brought in to devise a scheme to re-build the roof while conserving as much ancient timber as possible. Eventually a new double roof was constructed with a hidden longitudinal steel girder supporting everything.
When the south aisle roof was stripped an identical situation was found (see next photograph), mainly due to the ravages of beetle in the fifteenth century oak timbers. This new roof is also a double one and considerable amounts of oak had to be replaced, including one principal rafter. The quality of the timber and lead work on these two new roofs is superb and is almost entirely down to the skills of John Lodge, aided by Phil Dahl.
In the main the rest of the work was more straight forward. Any of the old hand-made peg tiles from the newly re-tiled chancel that were sound were saved to use on the vestry roof. One night the entire stack of tiles disappeared, so the vestry had to be roofed with the same tiles as the chancel. This probably gives a better appearance, so the thieves may have done us a favour. With the job now complete the last of the scaffolding came down just before Christmas 2002.
During the work many strange solutions to problems from the past were found, such as concrete being
used in the 1930s to fill voids in timbers left by death watch beetle. In the nineteenth century
the Victorians had put in a replacement main longitudinal beam for the nave in three sections, but
had cut the joints the wrong way up, allowing the whole beam to sag in the middle. Two important cogs
in rectifying such mistakes were our church architect Bruno Hooker, of John Glanfield & Partners, and
Phil Attelsey from Lodge’s with their combined experience and excellent co-operation.
The cost of the project was expected to be in the order of £128,000 but ended up at about £220,000.
With the help of grants from English Heritage and several charities and the generosity and hard work
of our congregation and other members of the village we eventually paid for it in full.
John Soanes.