On the Roof : Profile Books : 9781788167437 : 1788167430 : 29 Aug 2024 : A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 'An excellent, beautifully written book' Patrick Galbraith, Sunday Times 'A rich and hugely enjoyable celebration of the local, the vernacular and traditional ... a beautifully written craftsman's memoir' Daily Mail 'What a marvellous book. Full of lore, information, interest, beautifully captured people. Poetry' Craig Raine Thatched roofs are like living organisms: each one a web of repair, replacement and alteration, shaped, dressed and re-moulded by every pair of hands that works on it. Thatching is one of the world's oldest crafts - an ancient trade that roots us in nature, as Tom Allan discovered when he quit an office job to become an apprentice in Devon. Now a master of the trade, in On the Roof he goes in search of its history and future, meeting fellow thatchers, from the son of a lobster fisherman who thatches with a dune grass in the Hebrides, to a Syrian re