Choosing a skylight or rooflight for Wrightington's stone farmhouses and barn roofs

Wrightington is scattered rather than compact. There is no tight centre, and the houses lie spread along lanes and around the old farms, with open fields between them. Many of the oldest buildings are farmhouses and cottages of local stone, roofed in slate, with thick walls and deep window reveals. Next to them stand the farm buildings, and a good number of the barns and outbuildings have been turned into homes.

Later housing slotted into the gaps. Brick houses from the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth sit beside lanes. After the war came bungalows and detached family houses on large plots, and in the last few decades some of those have been enlarged with sizeable rear extensions, double-storey additions and converted garages. Wrightington Hospital sits in its own grounds within the parish, and Wigan and Parbold are close enough to shape who lives where.

No two houses here call for quite the same rooflight job. A barn conversion has a roof structure of heavy trusses and purlins that cannot be cut at random. A farmhouse loft is open to the stone gable and often has a stairwell with no outside window. A 1960s bungalow has a low pitch and a deep plan. A newer extension has a flat roof with a span to suit a lantern.

Large plots also mean larger roofs. The same house may have a main pitched roof, a lower pitched roof over a garage and a flat roof over an extension, and each calls for a different rooflight and a different kind of flashing.

Extensions deserve a note of their own. Where a farmhouse has been lengthened with a flat-roofed kitchen or boot room, the joists were sized for the span and the old covering, and a lantern adds weight and an opening that must be framed properly. We check what is already carrying the roof before we promise any frame size. Older cottages, on the other hand, may have a loft that was never boarded or lined, and the rafters, collars and ridge tell us how much of the slope can be opened without taking anything structural away.

In a village of one-off buildings, the survey matters more than the catalogue.

West Lancashire Borough Council's planning team is the one to ask, though houses here can normally fit a rooflight on the pitch as permitted development, with the limits listed under skylight planning limits. We check your slope against them at the survey, because a roof that turns out to be a different case is better discovered before you order than after.

Older farm buildings need more care. A village like this has listed stone farmhouses, cottages and barns, and any work to the roof of one needs listed building consent. A converted barn may have lost some of its permitted development rights through the consent that allowed the conversion, which makes the conditions on that consent worth reading. We cannot tell from the road whether a building is listed or restricted, so we ask you to check the council's records or the list at historicengland.org.uk, and we help prepare the details an application needs. The steps for getting consent are in applying to put a rooflight in a listed roof.

Building Control applies in every case, and we make the notification to West Lancashire Borough Council for you, as the thermal and legal side of rooflight Building Regulations explains. Planning and building control guidance sits on westlancs.gov.uk.

Outbuildings and annexes sometimes catch people out. A garden room, a detached garage that has been converted or an annexe used as a separate dwelling can each have their own planning history, and rooflight rights differ from one to the next. If a building falls into one of those groups, we ask what consent it was built or converted under before we price the work.