We encourage and help members research and write up the histories of houses that were built before the mid-1700s. This end date is intentionally inexact because we want to capture houses that pre-date the widespread use of mass-produced materials and where there was still distinctive local variation in plan, form and decoration.
Initially, this involves researching the internet, moving on to local libraries, county archives and national libraries. There is no cut-off date for the house histories, many of which take the story down to the present day.
All our house histories can be found in our Reports
We raise money from public and private sources to fund targeted tree-ring dating programmes.
This highly technical work is carried out by professional laboratories and entails drilling in-situ oak timber and removing small cores to compare with standard control chronologies – sounds simple but it’s a challenging science! Buildings were normally erected within a year or two of felling.
Unfortunately, not all oak is suitable for this procedure because many houses were built using ‘fast grown’ timber with insufficient tree rings. But scientific dating technologies are developing all the time and we will take advantage of breakthroughs as they come on stream. To date we have tree-ring dated over 100 houses.
Click here for more details on tree-ring dating.
