I'm sceptical about the slate roof too. Houses with slate roofs routinely lose slates in high winds which is dangerous. I narrowly missed being decapitated waki

I'm sceptical about the slate roof too. Houses with slate roofs routinely lose slates in high winds which is dangerous. I narrowly missed being decapitated waking around Brighton in a big storm in '90. I assume that this is a maintenance issue, the fixtures use to hold the slate tend to have a shorter lifespan than the slate itself. Many buildings in the UK that were originally slate roofed been converted to conventional ceramic or concrete tile. I'm surprised that there wasn't any discussion about thatch for the roof. It has a multi-thousand year history in the UK. So while it goes in and out of fashion, there's always someone around who knows how to do it. I had friends who lived in 500 year old cottage with an oak frame and a thatched roof. It has several very long maintenance cycles, annual, decennial, and semicentennial, but even those can be occasionally missed. It's a flexible form of construction in more ways than one