The Round House

North Duffield Conservation and Local History Society

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We are lucky that the Ellwood family have loaned us a piece of land upon which to build our roundhouse, very close to cropmark indications of a real Iron Age hut-circle.

Our first job was to fence the site for the roundhouse reconstruction and to level it out. We then set about sourcing the materials with the intention to use locally sourced materials as far as possible since that is almost certainly how the original occupants of North Duffield would have gone about it. There is no stone locally so our roundhouse will be entirely organic. Some of the materials have been brought to the site, mostly at little or no cost to the Society. This means we have a reserve of funds should we need to purchase some materials- possibly reeds for thatching may be a problem

Based upon visits to Butser Iron Age Farm in Hampshire, Ryedale Museum at Hutton-le-Hole, Heeley City Farm and St Wilfred's School, both in Sheffield, all of which have examples of roundhouses constructed on their sites and a model of a roundhouse, constructed by our Secretary, Tony Stevens, we now have a much clearer idea of the challenges that face us.

The group plan to use the schoolchildren to assist in the construction but would welcome any interested parties who feel they have the skills and/or commitment that the group can make use of.

Firstly we acquired lots of timber for the walls, posts and wall-plates from a clearance taking place in woods near Leeds.

Then we approached John Bramley who farms next to the Ellwood's and who grows willow for bio-mass. He was very obliging and not only helped us to harvest the withies but transported it to the site for us as well. We had to do three trips in the end.

Finally, an approach to Natural England resulted in their employee Fallon Mahon taking us to East Yorkshires' answer to the Everglades. Here, after a challenging ride on John Ellwoods tractor and trailer we sawed down loads of alder for the roof purlins and transported them back to the site.

We stripped the bark from the timber and left it stacked on site to dry out before we treated it with wood preservative.

The first real construction started on 21st April 2012 when four of us dug the post pits and erected the wall posts to a diameter of 5 meters, our chosen dimensions. The work went a lot better than we expected. We also raised two longer posts for the doorway and started to joint on the wall-plates with scarf joints and hand-made wooden pegs holding everything together. The doorway, of course, faces South East.

Over the next few weeks we constructed the walls by weaving the withies in between the posts..

We were weaving the willow to make the wattle walls in bad weather. Wet willow for wattle isn't the best medium in which to work. Anyway, we worked away weaving the willow wattle walls until we ran out of willow to weave. What'll (wattle) we do now we wondered? We have wun out of willow to weave. We wandered about wondering what to do. We wished we had more willow to weave the wattle walls but we were out of wood. We decided to work another day when we had more willow to weave. We had also run out of words starting with 'W'!

And so the woundhouse, sorry, roundhouse, progressed.

We next measured the centre of the inside of the roundhouse and then erected a tripod of purlins tied together at the top and buried in the ground at their bottom end. These were then drilled and secured with hand-made oaken pegs, This gave us our shape and pitch of the roof.

We decided to include a porch at the doorway(see photos). Finally we ran further lengths of willow round the beams to support the thatch. The wooden framework is now complete and treated with preservative.

The weather hampered our attempts to harvest water reed for thatching although, we did managed to cut and transport a few sheaves or yealms.

On 11 December we took a tractor and trailer to The Brick Yard at Hemmingbrough where Plasmore kindly donated four tons of clay for the daub of the walls.

John Ellwood managed to find time to collect some miscanthus from a local farmer, Richard McNeil,who is growing it for bio-mass fuel. Miscanthus is more commonly known as elephant grass. It is not native to the British Isles but since Iron Age man would have used any materials that were available we are sticking to the spirit if not the letter of re-construction. See side column for the most up-to-date picture.

We have been busily thatching this last couple of weeks and our progress despite snow and sub-zero(with wind-chill)temperatures has been pleasing. There is still much to be done. We are on the last tier of thatch as at 13th April 2013 -there only remains the 'cap' to place over the top to finish it off. W e have decided that, due to our inability to harvest Phragmites, this season we will leave the house thatched as it is and reconsider the situation next season. We may than put a covering o0f Phragmites over the top..

We have got the children gearing up to come and through a mixture of mud and manure at the wattle walls. That should be fun.

We will be having more days thatching soon, weather permitting.

For more photographs see 'Archive'

To keep up-to-date with progress visit this page from time to time.