Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@gunter wrote:

You’re some tulip, I’ll give you that:)

You resort to name calling = I win. Yes! 🙂

Seriously. You can’t seem to handle the fact that somebody is challenging your views. I mean, hello, you’re not writing a book here. This is a discussion board. It’s equal shout for all. And it’s not your own blog where you can delete comments you don’t like. If you put views on the internet, expect them to be challenged. So if you want to continue the discussion, try and keep it civil, huh?

@gunter wrote:

whatever the Newmarket house had, it wasn’t a single gable. There is no way you can credibly reconstruct a single gable on that house, without throwing out all the evidence from the roof, which from the angle of pitch, the small module size of the slates and the general appearance of wear and tear, is perfectly consistent with a very early 18th century date.

Ok so you’re completely refusing the possibility that this is a single span roof, where the visible span is sitting centrally over the house? There’s no possibility that the bit on the far left you want to be the left hand of two roof spans is just a bit of a slightly higher building next door? And there’s no possibility that the visible roof is not small enough to be one of two spans?

As you know I think the visual evidence is far too ambiguous for the conclusions you’re making, but how and ever …

I would take (and you presumably originally took) the central rainwater outlet – suggesting a central roof valley – as the most telling or obvious clue of a double roof, and possible former double gable front, notwithstanding the single-gable formation of windows in the facade (and the fact that I don’t believe small houses like this had double gable fronts). If you remove that central water outlet, does the house still look like it has a double roof? … not so much. (I might add that the left hand slope of the visible roof looks like it’s heading towards the left hand edge of the building, rather than the centre, where it would have to go if the roof were double.)

So is there anything else this central rainwater outlet – on a house in a market square – could have been? Could it have held a beam to hoist goods into the building’s enlarged second-floor window ope, before being reused as a water outlet?

Btw, small module slates, bedded into mortar, were used on all buildings before the late 19th century. But you know that, right?

Re College Green, I’m referring to the general vista of multi-gables rather one particular group.