Roofers in Hawkinge

Hawkinge is far enough from the sea that salt is much less of a factor, but it is high and open, so wind is. Being up on the downs means gusts arrive with more force than they do in the sheltered parts of Folkestone in the valley below.

So the failures here tend to be mechanical rather than corrosive: lifted verges, ridge tiles with blown bedding, and tiles dislodged in a gale rather than eaten away over decades.

A good deal of Hawkinge housing is recent enough that people assume the roof is fine, and often it is. What does turn up on newer estate roofs is detailing: dry verge units that have become brittle and come away, mortar bedding that was thin to begin with, and underlay torn where it was dressed into the gutter.

Those are small, cheap jobs when they are caught and a much bigger one once water has been running into the eaves for a couple of years.

North of Hawkinge the downs drop into the Elham Valley, and its two main villages are each about five kilometres away as the crow flies. Lyminge was a royal centre of Anglo-Saxon Kent, and its parish church of St Mary and St Ethelburga, dating back to about 965, is listed Grade I. Further up the valley, Elham was a small market town, and the council's appraisal counts some 43 listed buildings in the village, including timber framed houses from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Roofs on buildings like those are repaired in matching materials, and Elham is a conservation area, so a change of covering there is a question for the council before it is a question for a roofer.