Kyran O’Grady

O’Grady describes what thatching is and a little of the history of thatched houses in Ireland.

Basically, thatching is covering a roof with a natural material, be it straw, reed, rushes, that kind of thing. Now, mostly, I’d say 99 per cent of my work is in reed. The Latin for that is communis phragmites, and it grows on tidal marshes, which are kind of maybe four or five miles up a river where the tide still affects the reed. They also do grow around lakes, which, you know, don’t necessarily have a tidal aspect to them. It’s a huge root system that would start growing normally April, May. They’d be fully grown by September, and at that point they are anything from one and a half to two and a half metres tall and they have little nodes on them every six inches and they’ve got spear-shaped leaves on them. So, what happens then is from September to December the growth goes back down into the root, the leaves fall off and you’re left with this golden stem. And that’s when they’re harvested, when all the growth has gone back down into the roots. So then you put them on a roof and keep the rain out. In Ireland in general, yeah, as long as people have lived in houses, thatch would have been the first type of roof that went on a house. And traditionally in Ireland they are kind of small cottages that [were] lived in by relatively poor people. And then in England, they could have been rich men’s houses. You know, the Tudors built beautiful thatched buildings, but in Ireland the bulk of them would have been poor man’s houses.