Cheyenne Man Builds His Dream House: Throwback Medieval English Mead Hall

Happy Valley near Cheyenne, Wyoming, has something no one would ever expect to find. It’s a medieval-style mead hall, or “heall” in the king’s old English, built using an ingenious, near-extinct construction method called a “cruck.”

Crucks are made from old-growth trees split vertically down the middle and bent toward each other to form a wooden Gothic-style arch. The tallest crucks make quite an impression standing three stories high, but even short ones used in some of England’s oldest cottages make for intriguing design.

Happy Valley’s cruck-constructed home, however, has the tallest existing cruck known in the world today at 33 feet, according to its owner. The home was built by Cyning (pronounced Cooning) Meadowcroft, who came to America from England for health reasons, and settled on Wyoming as his forever home.

Building his cruck castle, which he calls Angelcyn Heall (pronounced Anglecoon Hall), has been a lifelong journey, one that, in some ways, started before he was even born.

“My father died when I was 2,” Meadowcroft said. “So, I didn’t know too much about him.”

Growing up, Meadowcroft gravitated toward furniture making and carpentry. It made him happy, and he was good at it. Really good.

Later, he learned his father and his grandfather had both been expert furniture makers and carpenters too.

“That was really quite wild to find out that history,” he said.

The Cruck Obsession

Learning his ancestors had all been furniture makers was, for Meadowcroft, freeing. It was like the heavens giving their blessing to his path in life.

He felt free to indulge his deep interest, which that came to include preserving Anglo-Saxon history, a period he considers a golden age. 

While there were many conflicts in the time frame from 410 to 1066 AD — as well as religious upheaval, and Viking invasions — as seen in the popular television series “Vikings Valhalla,” it’s also when the epic poem “Beowulf” was created.

Meadowcroft doesn’t know if crucks date back to the Anglo-Saxon period, but it’s possible. Given that wood tends to rot away, especially in a climate like England’s, no one knows exactly when crucks first appeared.

The oldest known has been dated to 1262, in the Royal George in Cottingham, Northamptonshire. Likely, that wasn’t the very first cruck, but how far back they go is impossible to know.

“I got very intrigued with crucks because it pertains only to England, and nowhere else in the world,” Meadowcroft said. “In fact, they don’t truly know where the Gothic arch came from, and I would argue it comes from the cruck, because the cruck slightly predates the Gothic era.”

Cottages with even a remnant of cruck are in high demand in England, he learned soon after that. And, when his uncle extended a 1600s cottage with a cruck in it, he did it very traditionally, using the same methods of construction, even including a spiral staircase made of primitive oak timbers. 

Meadowcroft started drawing up his own dreams for a cruck-constructed house after that. When his health took a turn for the worse, he visited a relative in America, and, eventually, made the decision to move to Wyoming. He brought all those dreams of a cruck-constructed home with him.

“I built a little cottage across the road here, and I lived in it, rough as it was,” he said. “It was half workshop, and the other half was wood stove and bedroom, and that’s about all it was.”

He chose Happy Valley for one important reason at the time. No zoning laws. He wasn’t sure Americans would understand crucks at all, and he feared if he had to try explaining them and contend with zoning laws, his dream house could never be built.

“I also didn’t want a subdivision with a time schedule,” he added. “I had limited funds, so I knew I was in for a long haul.”

The Ugly Duckling Becomes A Swan

Making a cruck is no easy feat. It all starts with finding a special location. An old-growth forest, with minimum 150 to 250-year-old solid trees, like oak. 

But not at the center of said forest, where one might find the oldest of the old trees. Those trees will be too straight for a cruck.

The cruck-suitable trees grow on the edges of the forest, where the trees will gracefully and naturally bend toward the sun. Those trees, when split in half, will create a very strong, very tall arch once they have reached a couple hundred years in age. An arch that can bear the weight of a roof and walls and the heavens above. 

“It’s very difficult, even in the Americas, to find such old growth,” Meadowcroft said. “Because in New England, the pilgrims cut it all down and just kept grazing. They didn’t really have to replace it, and so it got replaced with pine.”

In the Midwest, the Germans and the Swedes similarly cut down a lot of oak trees to build barns. 

For his purposes, Meadowcroft really wanted an oak tree as close to 3 feet around as he could get. And it was all but impossible to find.

Finally, in a forest in southern Illinois, he found what he was looking for. Or, at least, as close as he could come. 

The biggest of the two cruck-suitable trees was just shy of the 3 feet he wanted for the central-most, load-bearing cruck. 

“Most of that forest was growth that’s maybe 100 years old, which isn’t big enough,” Meadowcroft said. “But I found this one tree that had been left alone just because of its ugly state. It wasn’t commercial oak, as they would call it, so you couldn’t get nice long timbers out.”

It wasn’t as big as he’d hoped for Meadowcroft, but it was as close to perfect as he was going to get.

“The base had two limbs coming out of it, so, when I split it, I could get that Gothic shape to it,” Meadowcroft said.

It had been waiting all that time to be found by a man who could see a beautiful destiny for what others dismissed as just an ugly tree.

One Man And A Crane

Meadowcroft trucked his two cruck trees 2,000 miles round-trip to get them to their new home in Wyoming. Each was about 47 feet long, so would fit on a semitrailer — barely. But their weight was almost more than one truck could haul.

Getting crucks to Wyoming was the easy part.

“Normally, you’d build all of your crucks on the ground,” Meadowcroft explained. “And then you’d have 100 men to raise it.”

But Meadowcroft didn’t have 100 men to help him raise his crucks. He had himself and a used, 27-foot crane he’d bought for $5,000.

He had to figure out how to raise each cruck all by himself. So, instead of building crucks on the ground the more traditional way, he would raise one half of the cruck to the sky, then position it using the crane and a short side wall he’d built as a brace.

Then he’d raise the other half into its place, repeating the process in reverse, before connecting the whole thing together, 33 feet up in the air.

It meant a lot of climbing up and down to adjust things, Meadowcroft said, and ultimately took five or six years to build all nine of the crucks in Angelcyn Heall. 

“My brother’s an iron worker and he climbs these big steel skyscrapers for a living,” Meadowcroft said. “And he just shakes his head in disbelief because it’s not possible to do what I’ve done. He can’t see how I did it.”

Once all of the crucks were built, he proceeded with the rest of the home, adding walls, adding a roof, anchoring everything else together as he went, and double-pegging each and every one of 3,000 or so mortise and tenon joints.

“For the Globe Theater they reconstructed in London, it took them four years with 100 carpenters,” Meadowcroft said. “So, you can do the math on all of that, the cost and the time, and with me being on my own, single-handedly. That’s why I say building this was for the long haul.”

Meadowcroft started building his home in 2001, and, in 2025, he’s still working on the finishing touches. 

Fit For The King Of Wessex

For Meadowcroft, a true cruck goes from floor to ceiling uninterrupted, and all the weight of the house sits upon what becomes a long and elegant archway. 

Otherwise, it’s just a truss, and it’s not special to that one period of time, in that one place in the world, where crucks were born. 

The tallest surviving ancient cruck in England is the Leigh Court Barn in Worcestershire, whose crucks are 32.8084 feet. The total height of the building is 36 feet.

Meadowcroft’s tallest cruck is 33 feet, and the overall height of the building goes up to 38 feet.

Mead Haells, like the one Meadowcroft has built, are meant to be impressive structures. They were places where justice was meted out or church services held. Their height was meant to inspire awe, to say, “Here is a place where God is looking down upon a man and judging his soul.”

That grandeur is the first thing that impresses a guest in the home. The sweep of the crucks draws the eye to the ceiling and holds them there.

The effect is so impressive, Meadowcroft admits that he sometimes does call it a castle.

A traditional Mead Healle would not typically have bedrooms and such, but Meadowcroft was building a home. So, he has bedrooms in one-half of the hall, and stairs that lead up to a second and third floor, each with a balcony looking down on the living room below. 

There’s so much to the house, it begins to feel like a maze. 

But it is a dazzling maze, one that Meadowcroft has decorated with carvings of old-fashioned dragons and lions here, and bronzed pottery there. Every nook and cranny evokes a lost time period, including a life-size painting of Alfred, once upon a time King of Wessex.

A Castle On A Shoestring

The entire home has been built on a shoestring budget and is a testament to what a skilled carpenter can do with a little imagination. 

Meadowcroft went to yard sales, estate sales, and salvage yards, rescuing scraps that others could not see as treasures. The two rock-crushing tubs, made of especially strong metal, which he welded together to make a giant pot-bellied stove, for example. And the 1800s sandstone —rubble from a demolished foundation — which he used to build an alcove around the stove. There’s a clever nook tucked inside, behind the stove, where weary travelers might sit and draw all the chill from their bones.

“The key is the sandstone wicks all the moisture away,” Meadowcroft said. “If I was soaking wet, miserably cold, I could sit in here and all this in here — it’s called an Englander fireplace, because it wicks all the moisture away.”

Meadowcroft isn’t finished with his home yet. He expects that he’ll always be working on it.

Someday, he hopes to celebrate its history with a Beowulf night at the home. He imagines a feast fit for the King of Wessex, and music too, as well as a reading of the epic poem created during the Anglo-Saxon period of history, which to him, is a little golden age.

Until then, though, it is finished enough to feel like home. One man’s castle in a Happy Valley, a place where anyone can live like Alfred, King of Wessex, happily ever after, into a new golden age.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.