As we race to the finish line, Project coordinator Sue Webber reflects on how long it really takes to build a roundhouse.
Visitors often ask, “How long does it take to build a roundhouse?” And that’s a hard question to answer because it depends. It depends on how many people are working on the house, what skills they have, what the weather is like and what unexpected challenges they face. But to try to answer that question, let’s say a team of six with some building skills, might take 30 days to complete a roundhouse like our Bronze Age house, using traditional methods. With more people, or more experience it could be quicker but with bad weather and poor materials it could take longer.
But that’s just the build time, behind the actual physical build there are years of preparation to supply the materials that are needed. It’s easy not to consider where the materials to build the house come from. In our society most building materials are available on demand in exchange for money. They don’t come direct from the forest or the field, they come from the builders’ yard or warehouse.
In prehistory, people needed to manage their own resources. If your community was spending time developing farmland and building houses they would also need to consider how to manage the other resources they would need. If you wanted a good supply of lightweight timber that could be used for fences and walls, you would need to develop some coppiced woodland close to your settlement. Moving materials over distance takes human, or animal, energy so it would be good to manage a woodland that wasn’t too far away. Put simply, if you cut down all the trees close to your community and turn the woods into fields, you will have a long way to walk every time you need wood.
Many types of trees can be coppiced. That’s a technique where young trees are cut back to a low stump which regenerates and new, straight trunks grow back. These stumps are called “stools”. Hazel is an excellent wood to coppice and if you explore the old woodlands in the south of England you can find large hazel stools that can be hundreds of years old. It takes about seven years for a coppiced hazel to grow a trunk that is long enough to be used for wattle fences or walls, so a hazel coppice would probably be cut every seven years. If you need hazel to build your house, which we did, someone would have had to have coppiced a local woodland seven years earlier to ensure the supply was ready when you needed it.
The other materials you need might have been growing for longer, like bigger tree trunks for the roof, or other materials that need to be grown and cut in season, in this case water reeds or wheat stems for the thatch. Perhaps these materials were cut in advance and stored somewhere ready for when they were needed. Perhaps they were traded with other communities.
Other materials could be readily sourced but would need preparation. To make daub for the wattle walls you would need to collect animal poo in advance to mix with soil and straw and water. Perhaps a group of people would dig a large pit to mix it in. Then, it might have been mixed like a traditional grape press by using the feet of the community to make the right consistency. If you wanted to make walls from crushed chalk, you’d need to dig another pit, crush the chalk and mix that too.
So how long does it take to build a Bronze Age house? If we count the time to grow, harvest and prepare the materials needed, it takes years.
To support our Bronze Age Roundhouse project with Operation Nightingale and discover more behind the scenes footage of the build head to at www.butserplus.com where we are releasing weekly video episodes about work and projects at the farm. Thank you!