Roofing with straw

Usage examples of thatching.

It seemed silly that the natives should exist in huts, raising only a milpa, or small patch of corn cleared in the native jungle, and giving that no more cultivation than it required, and rarely doing anything else in the line of work except gather a few thick maguey leaves to repair a hut after wind blew the thatching away.

Some two thousand canes of these raufara, as they were called, each of them holding about forty pandanus leaves, were needed for the thatching of each dwelling.

And after we bought Teasel Hill, farmers could hardly find feed for their stock that season because the aristocracy was so busy thatching cottages for themselves with it.

Time had long since stripped his wavering old eyes of the power to detect light, just as it had stripped the untonsured parts of his head of every hair except for the dense eyebrows that hung down over his sightless eyes like old thatching on a ruined cottage.

He settled upon a grove of newgrowth pines occupying a narrow flood basin and set about stripping the soft lower branches from the surrounding trees to use as thatching for the den.

I checked my thatching and twine and mallet and nails, and began sliding across the ridgepole toward the hole.

So after he had bade them mend the thatching of the old house and see to the setting of the tiles where the new roof leaked and had commanded them to mend the hoes and the rakes and the plows and to feed the cattle and to buy ducks to herd upon the water and to twist hemp into ropes---all those things which in the old days he did himself when he tilled his land alone---his own hands were empty and he did not know what to do with himself.

Nedda, waking, could hear the heavy drops pattering on the sweetbrier and clematis thatching her open window.

One man was working on his roof, thatching an annex with freshly cured broadleaves.

He accompanied Craig on a tour of the homestead, sniffing appreciatively the sweet odour of the golden thatching grass that already covered half the roof area.

People said the thatching, and wood, and bone must have been all dried out.

The town had doubtless stood here for æons but gave the impression of having just been set up in the midst of an ancient forest, as giant trees—teaks, mangoes, mahua, mahogany, coconut-palm, axle-wood, and one or two cathedral-sized banyan trees—stood between houses, and spread and merged overhead to create a second roof high above the palm frond thatchings that topped the buildings.

It had not been occupied for well over three thousand years, and the thatching and the doors and windowframes had long since surrendered to the elements, leaving the shell of the house standing, bramble-filled and unroofed to the sky.

Then her mother and sisters and half-sisters had done the women's work of thatching, carefully combing the long grass stems and lacing the crisp bundles on to the wattle framework, packing and trimming and weaving them until the finished structure was smootll and symmetrical and the brushed grass stems shone like polished brass.