Roofers in Rode

Houses put up on the proceeds of the wool trade were not small, and a roof on that scale behaves differently from a semi's. Rode Manor, Langham House, Merfield House and Southfield House are the names the village's history gives us, and houses of their kind usually come with several roof planes, a number of stacks and long runs of gutter. More planes means more places where one slope meets another, and every meeting is a hip, a ridge or a valley.

Where two slopes run down into each other, the angle between them is a valley, lined with lead or similar sheet beneath the edge of the covering. It drains two slopes at once, and when it fails the leak often shows far from the cause, as a stain on a ceiling two rooms away. A hip is the reverse, an outward corner that sheds rain to either side and is capped along its length. Hips and ridges explain much of the price gap between a plain roof and a complicated one, and a surveyor counts them first.

That count feeds the figures. MyBuilder's 2026 guide puts a gable-ended roof replacement typically at £5,000 to £8,000 and a hipped roof at £8,000 to £12,000, because hips mean more cutting, more fittings and more hours on the scaffold. On a tall house, scaffold is a cost in itself, and it pays to share it between a repair and the other jobs that need access, such as the stacks and the gutters. These are national ranges, not an Empire price list; the fixed quote follows the survey.

Where the covering is sound and one valley has failed, the valley is repaired and the rest left alone. A roof that is spent moves the conversation to roof replacement, and the survey says which of the two applies. If the existing roof is natural slate or stone tile, the new one is the same, because the house was designed around it.

Behind the Cross Keys Inn lay the Fussell's Brewery site, which Bass used until 1992 and which was later sold to a housing developer. Homes built on ground like that belong to a different period from the mill-owners' houses, and they are roofed to a different specification. They are also younger, which changes what goes wrong.

On a fairly recent roof, the covering rarely gives out first. The trouble starts in the fixings and finishes. Along the spine of the roof, the ridge was for many years bedded in mortar, and mortar splits as the timbers expand and shrink through the year. The verge, where the roof overhangs a gable end, fails in the same way at its pointing, and wind then gets under the end tiles. BS 5534:2014 no longer accepts mortar alone for ridge and hip tiles, so current work adds a mechanical fixing. Dry-fix is the usual answer: clips, caps and seals screwed to the roof, with no bedding mortar to crack. BS 8612:2018 sets the tests such systems are held to.

Underlay deserves a look as well. Beneath the battens, this membrane catches rain driven past the tiles, and along the eaves it should deliver that water to the gutter instead of letting it pool behind. When it has sagged, curled or been cut short, damp creeps into the fascia board and rafter ends before a stain appears indoors. Defects like these seldom announce themselves, which is why a periodic inspection from the roof tells you more than a view from the lane.

The detail on loose ridges, cracked verge pointing and tired eaves sits on our ridge, hip and verge page. For scale, one 2026 MyBuilder guide gives dry ridge work at £40 to £60 a metre, with a whole installation typically between £500 and £1,000. Those are national figures; the fixed quote follows the survey.