Neil,
Reading all the wonderful articles on Cubits always seem to jog my memory of things long forgotten.
Seeing some of your buildings reminded me of visiting Greenfield Village in Michigan when our children were young. It's really cool as they have transported several buildings from all over and made it into a little village that you can visit. This link shows a cottage from your country that is there:
http://www.cotswolds.info/plac...
The most amazing thing for us about this cottage was one of the ceilings was the exact same design as one of the ceilings in our home that my husband built - 300 years later. It was a wood ceiling and mortise and tenon. We actually had 3 ceilings that were mortise and tenon and carried the 2nd floor of the house. The beams were 800 pounds a piece and it was just my husband and I building our home. We used wall jacks to hoist them but the beams even bent the wall jacks and even started pulling up the sub-flooring the wall jacks were nailed into. We were able to set about two beams a day. When people would come visit to see our progress, they thought the ceilings were really cool but when we would tell them there were no nails at all, they would run out of the house, thinking the ceiling might fall down. We giggled a lot.
Here is another home we visited when the children were young and if I remember correctly, there were at least 2 if not 3 rooms in this home that had literally been brought over from England.
http://cleveland.about.com/od/...
I thought you might like to see how we do have a little bit of your beautiful country over here.
I still can't get the 400 year old trees off my mind. You would think with us working with wood it wouldn't bother us be we are definitely tree huggers.
vic
vic