Roofers in Pickering

The roofs of Pickering

Pickering Castle was built shortly after the Norman Conquest and refortified in stone during the 13th and 14th centuries; English Heritage, which now manages it, describes it as a classic, well-preserved example of an early motte and bailey castle. St Peter and St Paul's Church holds what is recorded as the most complete collection of medieval wall paintings in England, hidden under whitewash from the 1850s until they were rediscovered and restored in the 1870s. The Whitby and Pickering Railway opened in 1836, originally horse-drawn, and further lines followed before 20th-century closures; the North Yorkshire Moors Railway preserved the route north of the town, reopening it as a heritage line in 1973, and at 18 miles it is recorded as the second-longest heritage railway in the United Kingdom, still running steam trains from March to November.

The roofs across Pickering's more than 250 listed buildings follow a familiar North Yorkshire pattern with pantile firmly in the lead. Named Grade II buildings recorded with pantile roofs include White Horse Cottage, the former King's Arms Inn, 19 Castlegate, Spring View and its farm buildings, The Low House, The Rose Inn, The Vicarage and the terraces at Birdgate, while Welsh slate appears on Ness House, 2 and 3 Market Place and 19 Hungate. Stone-coped gables and kneelers are a recurring detail across both, the kind of finish that a standard modern repair usually misses.

What sets Pickering apart is how it deals with water. Pickering Beck floods roughly every five years, with serious events in March 1999 and June 2007, and after the second of those the town chose a genuinely different response from anywhere else on our patch: rather than building the flood defences higher, it planted trees and built 167 small leaky dams in the hills above the town under the Slowing the Flow scheme, deliberately slowing the water on its way down rather than just containing it once it arrives. It is a nature-based approach that has since been studied nationally, and it sits directly upstream of every roof, gutter and downpipe we work on in the town.