Dry-ridge vs mortar roof on Victorian House

[jpcamps]

Hi – I’m trying to organise a few quotes for a complete re-roof.

 

My house is a Victorian building with Staffordshire Blue clay tiles. With the new roof, I believe there are two main types (but please forgive my total ignorance here), dry-ridge (likely more expensive upfront but saves on ongoing maintenance costs) and mortar-based (likely cheaper upfront but will have ongoing maintenance costs).

 

Is someone able to answer my questions, below, as I’m getting really confused about what is best?

 

Dry-ridge – will it be possible to keep the traditional look of the roof whilst using a dry-ridge system? This is the most important thing for me as I don’t want to make the house look silly with a Victorian building and “modern” looking roof if it would look “modern”.

 

Mortar-based – how often are we likely to require maintenance on a mortar-based roof? Especially bigger jobs that will require scaffolding. Can small issues be fixed by climbing a ladder, or will scaffolding be required in all instances? As you can imagine, I’m just trying to gauge what the likely ongoing costs are going to be.

 

I've had a couple of quotes already. One roofer mentioned it would be hard to get the traditional look using dry-ridge and the other said it would look fine with dry-ridge. 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Jpcamps

[Mr Punter]

They are not different types of roof, just a different way of securing the ridge tiles along the top.  The rest of the roof is exactly the same.  From the ground it is difficult to tell which you have.

 

The big difference to how the roof looks will be in the type of covering, where large format concrete tiles will look more modern than, say, clay plain tiles.

[tonyshouse]

What type of ridges will you be using, we generally put the original ones back on again. 
 

I don’t like cement pointing to the long edges but do like them bedded on . Always mechanically fix exposed end ones