The Bat House.
It was by happy accident we stumbled across the Dorset Centre for Rural Skills.
In 2004 the community in Chiswell, Portland, had the good fortune of a large grant from the Countryside Agency to create a Doorstep Green, a community garden in Chiswell. Our site was a walled compound, the remnants of 17th Century stone cottages. After we had removed concrete buildings, including a public urinal, and layers of tarmac we were ready to repoint the c.400 square metres of Portland stone walls.
We had bought bags of lime mortar from a Dorset Conservation firm with instructions attached, but the young builder who was prepared to learn the forgotten craft of using lime putty was making heavy weather of the job and was almost ready to quit. It was then we called in Rob Buckley of the DCRS. He came, he demonstrated the ancient craft and he encouraged us. We asked him back to give sessions to the wider community on the practical use and value of using lime for conservation purposes. John Cook, a graduate in Design and Construction, came to one of these sessions and was also smitten with the desire to learn more.
The pointing of the boundary walls took months to complete. In the meantime, in consultation with other members of the Chiswell Community, we decided we would like our garden shed, temporary though it might be, to become a ‘ hands on ' building and not the off- the- peg shed we had first envisaged. Rob Buckley was just finishing a straw bale office building at his Centre near Blandford. Could we build something like that? Rob pointed out our site was just too small – only 2m x 2m. Why don’t we build in wattle & daub? And make the roof a ‘living roof’? Both ideas appealed to us and we were able to convince our Council Planning Officer. We successfully applied for an Awards for All grant of £5,000. Work started in the summer of 2006, with Rob Buckley calculating the amount and type of timber we would need for the frame and roof – Douglas fir and Cedar in the green from Bulbarrow Timber Mills. There would be 20 open panels to be in-filled with hurdles, green hazel sticks harvested by the Dorset Coppicing Company from a wood near Wimborne. Our community would supply and mix the mud, straw and a little horse dung, and apply it by hand to the hurdles. This was a great job for local children, and messy though it was, even teenagers got involved.
John took on the very skilled craft of giving the mud panels inside and out two coats of lime render. It was time consuming work as the lime had to be well-mixed and tempered, but there was always someone who wanted to help. John found a local man, Bob, whom he could train and who is now as committed as we all are to the aesthetics and pleasure of using lime instead of cement. Then we realized, our little shed, as well as the garden itself, was offsetting any carbon footprint we could have been making.
Finally we read an article published first by British Gas and reprinted by the Guardian in November 2006- “The green house of the future – built c. 1550…… Tudor properties, with their oak beams plus wattle & daub infills leaked less warm air than modern houses….” .
We found a pipistrelle bat roosting on the inside wall one day in November. Maybe it agreed with the gas board so we gave the building a name -The Bat House.
M. Somerville
11th January 2007
November 2006. A pipstrelle bat spent a night or two on the back wall of the garden shed. We believe it is roosting in the small pictched roof above.