East wind
It's in the nature of this place, up on its high ridge, that it lives in the wind blowing in off the grey Atlantic. Our winds are westerly or southwesterly 70% of the time. Being on the western side of the ridge, my croft takes the full force of them. That's the main reason why I'm designing my croft house to be earth covered, sunk into a natural declivity in the ground. But I don't yet have a croft house; I don't yet have planning permission. So I've built a temporary shelter, my summer palace, which is essentially just a platform in the trees with a crude tent over it. And because the prevailing wind is in the southwest, I've built it in the northeast corner of my wood.
All the time I've been planning and building the summer palace, the wind has been in the west, and the wood has given it good shelter. Today, it was virtually finished. Today, I moved the last of the furniture into it. Tonight I would have moved in completely, but that I have to go to Edinburgh at the weekend, and I didn't want to leave the cats alone in a place they weren't familiar with...
Tonight, according to the met office weather station four miles away, it's blowing force nine. From the East.
Planking the roof
Radial planking
Planking the roof of the cone poses interesting problems. You can plank a cone radially, and every plank is straight. My rafters run radially, but that doesn't have to be a problem; I could put short purlins between the rafters to fasten radial planks to. I can even envisage some rather pretty joinery for those purlins. It isn't impossible.
But every plank would have to be cut longitudinally — identically, so I could make a jig and it wouldn't be a big deal, but it's a significant job. More significantly, radial planking also would not strengthen and stiffen the roof, and I'm still concerned by my friend Pete's comment that the roof could be floppy in strong winds. The tensile bracing which Pete suggested and which I've shown in the last drawings will help, but...
Transport
One of the things I need to consider about the croft is moving around. Not moving me around, my feet or a bicycle do that. And for getting my groceries home, well, a bike or my feet or at worst a wheelbarrow will work. But while building my house I'm going to need to get a fair bit of building materials in, and once it's build I'm still going to need occasionally to move heavy or bulky stuff around.
The planners, of course, will not want a house which cannot be reached by road. But the planners are not me, and I do. At present, you can get a normal car over the hill to the croft... in dry weather. In normal weather, you can't — not because it will sink in, but because you can't get traction. The hill is too steep and you can't get grip.
So what are my options?
Longeaves
In my last essay I wrote of some unresolved issues in the singlespace design. In summary
- In a single space, a lavatory poses a problem;
- In my design as it stood, there was no external storage, for bicycles and firewood;
- The roof was potentially floppy, and thus vulnerable to damage in strong winds;
- Drainage on the north, uphill side, is problematic;
- The cone is an unnatural shape in the landscape, and half of it drains north, aggravating the drainage problem.
I've tried to address these issues in a new variant of the design, longeaves.
Shapes in the landscape, and aerodynamics
I've now discussed the singlespace design with a lot of people, and got useful feedback.
Several people have queried having the loo in the singlespace. Actually, that was never the plan. The plan is to have a cludgie about 50 metres away in the wood. However, this is a house to grow old in, and while it's one thing to go fifty metres into the wood on a warm summers day at fifty five, it may be a different thing on a cold winters night in twenty years time. So the design has to have an account of where an indoor water closet will go. And just at present it doesn't.
Another friend asked where I would put my bikes. Again, a very good question which this design really doesn't address. And it does need to. There's no point in having a dwelling which is almost invisible in the landscape if it's surrounded with ugly sheds.