Burtle Village Hall Refurbishment Project - Plan B

We were turned down by the Lottery Fund for a new Village Hall so we have decided to extend and refurbish the old one ourselves with straw bale walls and sheep fleece roof insulation.

We already know where our walls are growing, and our roof insulation is still feeding lambs in fields round the village.

We have most, but not all the specialist skills we need within the village, and since the whole project is very low tech almost everyone who wants to can be a builder.

The principle is that we are going to put an agricultural barn over the whole hall, cocoon the walls in straw bales, and put sheep fleece between the old and new roof. We have just started, and by the time we finish we want every child in the village who is old enough to stand up to have jumped on a bale and helped to build it, and put their hand prints in the clay plaster, which means that for the rest of their lives they will remember that they helped. We are hoping that we can have a “wall of clay “section inside the hall with all the children’s hand prints in it.

If you want to sponsor a bale we will give you a “time capsule “ envelope which will be built into the walls. Unless you are very young you may never see it again, but someone will, and it will be a remarkable archive of local personal history.

Burtle is a small village of about 300 people on the Somerset levels near Glastonbury. It has a small church (also in need of repair), two pubs and a village hall which was built in 1939, is tired, cold, and looks like a chicken shed. Burtle is thus of little consequence to the rest of the world, except that, unusually, it has a Silver Band (who practise in the hall), an amateur dramatics club that perform in the hall, a book club, a garden club , a monthly Cafe Burtle, weekly Keep-Fit classes and an oddly strong sense of community.