Icicles

Our home is one of a terrace of four cottages built in the 1880s. The rooms upstairs occupy half of the roof space, and every time we get an extended period of freezing weather icicles develop outside the windows in the roof. They become increasingly impressive the longer the freeze continues.

Unfortunately, they are actually an indication of how energy-inefficient these cottages are. There is only a thin layer of plaster, wood and tiles between the sloping ceilings of these rooms and the freezing exterior, and the icicles are the result of our precious heating escaping to melt the snow on the roof.

This photo shows our neighbour's icicles, which this year are even more impressive than ours.