Agricultural and barn roofing around Knighton

Knighton is a border town in the Teme valley, built steeply up the hill from the river, with Victorian brick and stone terraces, a Victorian clock tower at the centre and the Offa's Dyke path running through it. The farms around Knighton, out towards Knucklas, Bucknell, Beguildy, Llangunllo, carry every kind of agricultural roof: stone barns in slate, Dutch barns in rusting tin, cattle sheds and workshops in asbestos-cement sheet. Farm roofing is its own trade and we pass your enquiry to a roofer who does it, not a house roofer on a big shed.

The buildings around Knighton

Slate on most of the older houses, with steep pitches on the hillside streets that make access and scaffolding part of every job.

Re-sheeting and re-roofing

Steel sheet

Box-profile or corrugated plastisol-coated steel on checked purlins, with rooflights and ridge ventilation for stock. The fastest way to make a working building dry.

Fibre cement

The asbestos-free sheet that replaces old cement roofs like for like, and the better choice over livestock for condensation.

Stone barns

Re-slated like a house, and if the barn is listed or in a scheme, slate is expected. The town centre and the Narrows are a conservation area, and the town straddles the border, so some properties fall under Shropshire's planning rules rather than Powys's.

Asbestos-cement roofs

Most sheds put up before 2000 around Knighton are roofed in asbestos cement. Sound sheet can stay and be managed. Removal is non-licensed work under HSE rules if the sheets come down whole and wet, but sheets that will be broken up are notifiable, and the waste must leave with a registered carrier under a consignment note. Ask the contractor to show both.

Weather on the farms

Being on the English side of the hills it is drier than the west of the county, but the valley gets frost pockets and the wind funnels along the Teme. Sheet roofs are fixed for that exposure, with stitching screws at the laps and the ridge, and a shed re-sheeted without them loses sheets in the first gale.

How it works

Tell us what the building is, its rough size, what it is used for and what the roof is made of. We pass it to a roofer who does agricultural work around Knighton, and they visit and quote in writing. Free to use. We do not advise on grants; check the current Welsh Government scheme with Farming Connect.