After a gale the damage on a roof is rarely spread evenly. The slopes are usually fine. What has gone is a run of tiles from the ridge, or a strip of mortar and edge tiles from the verge, the neat edge where a gable roof meets the wall. Both sit where the wind is strongest and where the fixing is weakest. A ridge is the roof's highest point, the one place every gust must pass over. A verge is its free edge, where the wind can get underneath instead of sliding across the surface. This guide explains why those two parts fail first, what to do in the hours after you find a loss, how they are refixed so a repeat is less likely, and what to expect from an insurer. It is written for the homeowner standing in the garden looking at a broken tile, not for the roofer.
Why ridges and verges go first
Wind does not push on a roof so much as lift it. As air flows over a pitched roof it speeds up across the top, and fast air has lower pressure. The result is suction that pulls upwards on the covering, strongest along the ridge, at the corners and around the edges. Anything that is not fixed down against that pull will lift.
The ridge and the verge are also the parts held most weakly. The main slope of a roof is nailed or clipped course by course, with each tile locked under the one above. A ridge tile has nothing above it. It sits on top of the roof, bedded in mortar, and that mortar is all that stops it lifting. Mortar is good at taking weight and poor at resisting a sideways or upward pull, and it cracks and crumbles with age. When it has lost its grip, a gust is enough.
A verge is similar. The tiles along the edge of a gable are bedded on mortar over a strip of tile or board called the undercloak, which gives them somewhere to sit. As the mortar weathers, the edge tiles loosen and the wind finds the gap. Once a verge tile lifts, the next one is exposed too, so damage runs along the edge.
This is why the ridge and verge are checked first on a survey. A loose piece may look sound from the ground until a storm tests it. Our page on dry verge problems looks at what goes wrong with the newer clip-fixed systems.
What to do when you find damage
If tiles or ridge pieces have come down, treat the ground below as a hazard first. Keep people and pets away from the area, and look for fragments that have slid down the roof and lodged in a gutter or on a lower roof. Do not climb up to look. A wet, windy roof is the worst possible place to find out how badly a tile is loose.
Take pictures from the garden, or from an upstairs window if the view is good. Include the fallen pieces, the bare patch on the roof and the ground around it, and keep the broken tiles. They show the profile and colour for matching, and they show an insurer what was lost. Our guide to ridge tile types explains how a roofer identifies the tile from a broken piece.
If water is coming in, deal with that straight away. Put a bucket under the drip, move belongings, and tell us it is leaking. Leaks and storm damage are prioritised on our side. Where the roof is open to the weather we make it safe first, with the permanent repair following once the weather allows and the right materials are on hand.
If a loose ridge tile is hanging off the roof, it is a danger to anyone passing below. A temporary fix from a roofer, usually a tile refixed or a section covered, is worth having before the next gust takes the rest. Whatever you do, avoid the mix-and-patch approach of daubing cement on from a ladder. It looks like a repair, but it adds weight and rarely holds.
How a ridge is refixed so it stays
The standard that governs this work is BS 5534:2014. Its message is plain: ridge, hip and verge pieces should have a mechanical fixing, since a bed of mortar will not hold on its own. So a good repair does not simply put the tile back on a fresh bed of mortar. It adds a fixing that does not depend on the mortar holding.
There are two ways to do this. The first keeps the bedded ridge. The old mortar and any loose tiles are cleared, the tiles are rebedded on fresh mortar, and each one is secured with a clip, bracket or screw to a ridge batten (a timber strip running along the top of the roof) so it cannot lift even if the mortar cracks. The mortar is then pointed to a finish that suits the roof. Our guide to lime mortar ridges covers when lime is the right mix.
The second is a dry ridge. Here the ridge tiles are held down by screws or clips on a rail, with no mortar at all, and a roll or strip under the tiles keeps out weather. Dry-fix systems are covered by BS 8612:2018, a test specification. For cost, one third-party guide (MyBuilder, dry ridge, 2026) gives £40 to £60 for each linear metre as a usual UK range, a national figure and not an Empire price.
Which route is right depends on the roof. A listed or period roof often keeps a bedded ridge for appearance, with hidden fixings added. A plain modern roof may suit dry-fix. Either way, the ridge is levelled on the batten and the tile joints lined up so rain runs off and not through.
How a verge is made secure
The verge is repaired by working from the roof edge inwards. The loose edge tiles are lifted and the old mortar is chipped away. The undercloak, the strip underneath, is checked, and a rotted or broken piece is replaced because everything above depends on it. If the undercloak is sound, the verge tiles are rebedded on fresh mortar and held with fixings, so the edge is locked to the roof and not just stuck to it.
Many newer roofs use a dry verge system. A clip or fixed trim grips each edge tile and the batten behind it, so there is no mortar at the edge to crumble. These systems are neat, and they are less likely to shed their mortar. They can still fail if the clips are missing, if the wrong clip was used for the tile, or if the batten behind has rotted. Our page on verge clips explains what the clips do and how to check them.
On some older houses the verge is formed with a bargeboard or an overhanging edge, and the repair involves the timber as well as the tiles. If the board is soft, it is dealt with at the same time. Water that gets in behind a verge usually travels along the timber and out of sight, and a small hole at the edge can lead to a long-term rot in the gable.
Wherever we reset a verge, we line it so that the tile overhang sheds water into the gutter or clear of the wall. That detail is easy to get wrong and hard to see from below, which is why we photograph it for you.
Insurance, evidence and cost
Insurance is often the next question after a storm. The first test an insurer applies is whether the weather counted as a storm. Many of them follow the Association of British Insurers definition, where a gust of 55 mph or more qualifies. Cover can also lapse where a policy puts the loss down to wear and tear, for instance rain entering a roof that had been poorly maintained. Which? reported, citing Financial Conduct Authority figures, that only a minority of storm claims made in 2024 ended in a payout, 32 per cent according to those figures, and its piece on home insurance and winter storms sets out the position.
No roofer can promise a claim will succeed, and the claim itself stays yours to make. What we can give you is clear evidence. Photographs taken before the repair, the broken pieces, and a written note of what was found and why it failed, are the things an insurer asks for. Where the cause was an old mortar bed that had crumbled, say so clearly in the report; it is better for a claim to be accurate than hopeful.
On cost, the MyBuilder roof repair guide (2026) reports storm-damage fixes typically costing £500 to £1,500 across the UK. That is a national range from a third-party guide, and the actual figure depends on the length of ridge or verge affected, how many tiles are broken, whether timber is damaged and what scaffold is needed to reach it. A fixed price in writing follows our survey, so you know it before work starts. If the damage is covered by your policy, you can send that quote to your insurer.
A smaller repair done promptly is almost always cheaper than a larger one after a second storm. A single loose run of ridge, caught early, is a straightforward job.
Preventing the next failure
You cannot make a roof storm-proof, but you can make the ridge and verge less likely to be the weak point. The most useful step is a regular check from the ground, particularly after strong wind. Look along the ridge line for gaps, tilted tiles or lines of cracked mortar. Look at the verge for open joints or green staining where water is getting in. Binoculars help.
If the mortar is cracking or the ridge has not been touched for a long time, it is worth having it assessed before a storm, not after. Re-bedding with a proper mechanical fixing costs less than a repair that needs scaffold and an emergency visit. Our page on ridge repairs in winter explains when the work can be done in cold weather and what frost does to fresh mortar.
Keep trees trimmed back from the roof edge, since a branch moving in the wind can rub and lift tiles. Make sure the gutters are clear, because overflowing water saturates the verge and encourages moss, which holds moisture against the mortar.
On Bath's older houses, with stone parapets, lead gutters and ridges bedded in lime, the repairs have to respect the original materials. We match the tile and the mortar to the roof and add the hidden fixings the standard calls for. A listed house needs a word with B&NES Council before the look of the ridge changes. The whole service is described under ridge and verge repairs.