The buildings presented here were made using the basic techniques of foam-board building, as outlined in the main section on buildings.

First, before I get onto the actual thatching bit, a word of wisdom, which I wish I had heard years ago from someone else. What I normally do is build my buildings, and then strive in vain for a good way of storing them. This time, I started with the box I planned to store them in and made them to fit it exactly so that they don't rattle around, and are easy to transport. All nine buildings you are going to see fit into one shoe box. See how neatly they all fit. Each roof on its inside has a letter code which matches a letter on the underside of the building it fits. You can see the base of a building that is stored upside down.

I made them in different sizes, so that they could be stored inside each other like Russian dolls. While I was at it, I made some piles of logs that go in the smallest houses. The supports on the insides of the roofs had to be cut down a bit so that the larger roofs could sit on top of the smaller. You can't see that here - in this shot, all the roofs have been removed.

Here you see two thatched long houses. Many people think of thatch as being a golden yellow colour. Well, straw thatch is a sort of sandy colour when it is first put on a building, but after a while in the weather it goes a dull brown or even grey. Also, straw is not the only thing used for thatch. Water reeds and heather were also used, and heather particularly can go a very dark colour, and is sometimes called "black thatch".

The larger house on the left has been textured with rough paper glued on with thinned PVA. Most paper does not work for this task. Blotting paper works, as do many old-fashioned hand-made papers. The paper you pick must have a bit of roughness to its texture, and must be absorbent and weak, so that when it is soaked in glue, it goes very floppy indeed. Don't try water-colour paper, because it is expensive and doesn't work. The texture of the paper imitates rough mud daub, and has been dry-brushed with a light sandy-coloured paint to bring out the detail.

The paints I used for some parts were cheap Anita acrylics which are fine for painting scenery, and very cheap poster paints, into which I mixed some PVA to make them flexible, water-resistant and strong.

Note that the front wall of the house on the left does not come to a point at the top, but instead is truncated, leaving a gap just under the apex of the roof. This is a very quick and easy way to do windows.

The smaller house on the right has been textured with brown acrylic mastic (see river section for details on this substance). This I daubed over the walls with my favourite sculpting tool, and then I pressed some split match-sticks into it for the door surround. When it was dry, I dry-brushed it with sand paint and then the walls were finished.

The doors are made from a rectangle of thick card with thin card or split match-stick planking on them.

The roofs are big rectangles of thick card covered with bath mat. I had an old brown bath mat and thought that I'd use it to make a load of thatched buildings. Having made nine with it, I still have most of it left, and I have another one, so I have learned that one bath mat goes a long way. In case you are unfamiliar with bath mats, these are the things that British people step onto immediately after getting out of the bath. They are thick absorbent mats, with a non-slip under surface. The pile on them is not looped back on itself like towelling, nor vigorously upward-pointing like carpet. I don't know of another material that would do the job just right.

Another thatched house, this time with a planked front wall. The planking is made by sticking on some textured card that I cut from a greetings card I was sent. The dry-brushing is rather important to bring out the texture. I was, and still am, considering painting on some large fancy design of interweaving lines, perhaps in the Celtic style. We don't know how people decorated these houses in the distant past, so we have a fair amount of licence.

The door is textured with mastic, which I have sculpted to look like fur. I have seen several re-constructions of houses which have fur-covered doors for warmth. The fur overlaps the edge of the door, and lines the door-frame too, to form a draught-excluding seal.

You may notice that the thatch is slightly darker along the apex of the roof. This was the first roof I made, and I cut two rectangles of matting, one for each side. I was worried that the pile, if parted in the centre and combed down each side, would leave a bald patch running along the apex. Accordingly, I glued lots of bits of cut pile down the join to hide it. This took time and was quite unnecessary.

This is the underside of the roof. You need to hide the edges of the card of the roof. Having tried a few different methods, I came up with one that was both far and away the easiest and best. I cut the matting slightly too big to cover the card, so that it overlapped the card a bit, then I piped a line of brown mastic down the underside edges, and then just bent the overlap over and pressed the pile into the mastic, which held it.

The easiest way to do a simple pitched roof as you find on a longhouse, is to make the card roof first, with its internal struts (see how I do this on the second building page) and cut a single oblong of bath matting and glue it onto the roof. If the mat is shaggy enough, you won't get a bald line running along the roof apex. I did some roofs using more than one piece of matting, and found that as long as the join between two pieces of mat was not at the apex, it didn't show.

I have considered that I might put a load of diluted PVA on one of the roofs, and comb the roof so that the pile lies flat and downward-facing, and wait for the glue to dry and hold it there. I doubt I will do this though, because the roofs look fine as they are, and there is a soft friendly pleasing quality to their current texture.

A byre. Bored of long-houses, and wanting a building in which I could place a visible archer who could shoot out, I made this. The animals can shelter in the darkness, or come to the corner to be fed and fussed over. The wattle was made in a very quick simple way indeed. I used an old beach mat, of the sort that people roll up and take to lie on so that they do not get sand all over their towels. I quickly found that when cut into strips, this stuff falls apart, so before cutting a strip of it, paint undiluted PVA all over one side of the mat to hold it together, and when this has dried, cut your pieces out. It was very easy to paint, too. I just painted it all over with brown paint, and then while the paint was still tacky, I rubbed over it with my thumb, exposing the straw-coloured highlights.

Most cooking and heating in these houses would have been fueled with wood. Many re-constructions I have seen have large wood-stacks under the eaves. You can see one here, glued to the base of the building. Nearby is a woodpile. The base is card covered with mastic, and the rest is just snapped twigs. I made a couple of these very quickly, and they add quite a bit to the scene, and give fighters in skirmish games something to hide behind as they approach the buildings.

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