Reading Roger Deakin's Wildwood recently, I noted with particular glee a description of the complex process of thatching, with its wonderful vocabulary. And only a week later, I was staying in a Dorset pub, the excellent Anvil Inn, which was mid-way through being re-thatched, though sadly with imported Ukrainian reed, not the superior Norfolk variety. I took the opportunity to go up on the roof and have a closer look!
The old thatch is not completely always removed, so you see old grey thatch being gradually overlaid by the new, yellower reed.
Bundles of reed are laid in place, but tightly, and are secured by various pieces of hazel (willow in the Midlands, more flexible but not so long lasting). The hazel is cut in the winter, as the sweet sap in the summer wood attracts woodworm, clearly a bad idea in a roof you want to last for thirty years or more.
Hazel rods are split lengthways - try doing that with a billhook on your knee without doing yourself an injury - and cut to different lengths and some twisted to provide scissor sprung clips over the thatch and the horizontal poles. You can see this all quite clearly in my pictures, though it looks much less secure than it actually is - neither man nor gale will easily shift this roof when it's complete.
The horizontal pieces are, apparently, liggers, and the sprung twisted hazel clips are called brorches, at least in Suffolk. The great OED knows not brorches, but they are also known as sprays in the Chilterns, buckles in Worcestershire, spars in the south-west, and spekes in Wiltshire. What words, I could be drunk on them! Whatever they are called, you can see them below, holding the ligger down on the thatch.
The OED does know ligger however, and offers no less than seven definitions, all quite different; Call My Bluff will never be the same again. A ligger is: a coverlet, a scaffolding timber, a horizontal branch in a laid hedge, an hazel thatching strip, the nether millstone, a plank bridge across a drain, a line and bait for pike fishing, one who puts the wool on the carding machine, or a gatecrasher of parties. What a cornucopia of words and meaning we have here.
But the important thing is the thatch roof, warm, dry and cosy. It looks soft and snug from a distance, but the cut ends are harsh and unwelcoming; reed thatch is much less plagued, therefore, by birds nesting and mice than cereal straw like wheat or barley.