Hi Tim,
As luck would have it I do believe that Richard married a girl from Maine quite a few years back and so he would probably be more than familiar with local Maine timber frame building styles and practice as well as the dusty old English ones. Who knows in retirement he might well be tempted to pen a book on your topic.
Your local observations about departed houses and the peoples who used to inhabit them sent a shiver down my spine. I have seen this type of thing before in various parts of New England where field walls are now buried deep in the now regrown woods and barn basement foundations made from large rocks cleared from the fields. There is an excellent "diorama" (model) at Petersham (Harvard Forest) in Massachusetts where the process of clearance, settlement, abandonment and regrowth is ably demonstrated. Sounds like a new wave of colonisation is taking place but this time with the filofax and UTE rather than the plough and horse.
Regards
Ken Hume
