Roofers in Boroughbridge

The roofs of Boroughbridge

Boroughbridge was created as a new town in the early twelfth century at the highest navigable point of the River Ure, first recorded as "Pons Burgi" in a 1145 charter, and its whole reason for existing was trade: wool and grain from the Fountains Abbey estates, cloth and linen from Knaresborough, lead from Nidderdale and goods from Ripon all passed through on their way to York. The three Devil's Arrows standing stones on the town's edge, a Scheduled Ancient Monument of millstone grit hauled from Plumpton Rocks, predate the town by thousands of years and include one of the tallest standing stones in Britain. The 1322 Battle of Boroughbridge, in which the rebel Earl of Lancaster's army was defeated by the forces of Edward II, is recorded in English Heritage's own Register of Historic Battlefields.

The town's stone bridge, rebuilt in 1562 and carrying what became the Great North Road, needed 21 major repairs in the seventeenth century alone, some of them by the pioneering road builder "Blind Jack" Metcalf of Knaresborough, and was widened by John Carr in 1785. Up to 22 inns served the drovers, stagecoach travellers and river-boat crews who passed through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the annual Barnaby Fair horse market continued until the 1980s. All of that traffic vanished almost overnight when the A1 bypass opened in the early 1960s, taking Great North Road traffic away from the town for the first time in 800 years and badly hitting its hotel and catering trades, though the town has since recovered as a genuinely attractive small centre in its own right.

Boroughbridge Conservation Area Character Appraisal, approved by the then Harrogate Borough Council in November 2008, is refreshingly direct about the roofs: "the majority of buildings are of brick but there are also a large number which are rendered... Pantiles are the predominant roofing material but there is also evidence of Welsh Slate." There are 60 individually Grade II listed buildings inside the conservation area, none of them Grade I or Grade II*, mostly two-storey brick with chimney stacks at the ridge and boundary walls in brick with stone copings. That is an unusually plain and specific statement to find in a council document, and it means a Boroughbridge re-roof is rarely a guessing game: pantile is the safe default, with genuine Welsh slate on a real minority of buildings that need checking individually.