GREGORY HOENIG/WTE Cyning Meadowcroft makes a wooden peg that will hold together some of the timber in his hall.

CHEYENNE - When most people think "Laramie County, Wyoming," they do not think, "Great place for a medieval mead hall."

But Cyning Meadowcroft did. And the uncanny thing is, when you come to the dusty end of County Road 110A, you might just find yourself agreeing with him.

The tall, arching framework that will become Angel Cynn Heall rests on a windswept plot of dry, golden grass framed by the dark Sherman Mountains and their foothills in the distance. Suddenly, Laramie County starts to seem a lot more romantic; a lot more Middle Earth than Middle America.

What is even more extraordinary is that the entire 33-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide and 75-foot-long edifice is being constructed almost entirely by one man, a 41-year-old English wood craftsman by the name of Cyning (pronounced Kooning) Meadowcroft.

Since 2001, he has slowly been erecting the crucks, or arches, and their support framework - held together at 3,000 joints fastened by over 4,000 handmade wooden pegs - that will support the building he will one day call home.

Inside, a 960-square-foot great hall will hold a hearth, a walk-in fireplace, a 17-foot mead table and a carved tribute to Alfred the Great, the first King of England. On the exterior, Anglo-Saxon dragons designed and carved by Meadowcroft will guard the building's corners, and he has planted over 70 oak saplings on the property.

But the hall will also will be equipped with modern utilities, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a dining room, kitchen, study and wine cellar.

Supporting the whole edifice are crucks. A cruck is a curved support beam made from a naturally leaning tree.

Unlike the straight beams used to make an A-Frame, that create an awkward unusable space at the place where the wall meets the floor, trees that make good crucks grow straight at the base, then arch inward the way the lines of a Gothic cathedral do. Meadowcroft believes cruck halls may have provided part of the influence for that style.

For medieval English commoners, however, a cruck was a simple way to construct a roofed building using a natural material. They did not have to be large - they could be just the size of a cottage.

Meadowcroft split each leaning tree in half and joined the halves at the top to form the arches. He lifted the beams into place himself using an old crane he purchased for the purpose.

Though he estimates his home will be worth significantly more when finished, so far, he's spent less than $100,000 for all of the materials and land. That was helped considerably, he said, because he bought the land before prices soared, and he bought and shipped the wood before transportation prices did the same.

But he's also been crafty in procuring supplies. He cut a deal on the wood for the crucks because bent trees aren't valuable as timber. He picked up the stones for his gate and fireplace by hand and for free from construction work along Happy Jack Road (they were weathered stones, and weathered stones are worth more because they are less likely to crumble when exposed to the elements, he explained).

The antique red roof tiles that will cover most of the roof were salvaged "for a song" from a home in Cheyenne that was being re-roofed. And the 330 sheets of insulation he will use came for free from the remodeling of the Laramie County jail.

Meadowcroft, who sports a crisp English accent and owns a friendly white cat named Elvis ("the kids named it"), lives in a small workshop and home he built at the back of the property.

There, in a sitting room with an ornate wood stove and a table fashioned from the planking and framework of a medieval English home, he serves Earl Grey tea and converses about the complex turn of events that landed an Englishman in the Cowboy State.

He was born in Sutton Coldfield, near Birmingham, England, but his father died when he was 2, and his mother moved the family to Wales. It was not a happy time for Meadowcroft.

Some of the inhabitants of the town he moved to did not look kindly upon the English, in the same way many Northern Irish resent English presence. He recalls his family being the victims of both physical and psychological threats. English homes in the area were burned down. A group of youths overseen by adults kicked in his back door.

Woodworking was a relief from all that. It had always been in his family, he said. Many of his ancestors were woodworkers, and his great uncle was the manager of a famous furniture store.

He began studying woodwork at school. He salvaged boards from the local lumberyard and carried a stack home each day to provide raw material; he built a shed in his backyard and tables for his sister. After finishing school at 16, he took jobs at theaters and furniture shops and gradually learned about all aspects of working with wood.

He decided to visit an aunt in Salem, Mass., when he was 21. He liked it there and soon began doing home renovation work on some very old colonial buildings, which sparked an interest in English history.

At the same time, he met and married an American woman, and they moved back to England in 1990. There he worked rebuilding houses and constructing additions, but he also took on furniture projects.

He was quite successful, he said, but years of working around wood dust without a mask caused his respiratory health to deteriorate. Asthma, hay fever and other maladies became an unpleasant and regular part of life.

At the same time, Meadowcroft was becoming heavily involved in the English Parliament movement, an effort to give England, like Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, a legislative body of its own outside the British Parliament.

His interest in English history continued, and he joined a group called The English Companions, a group devoted to the study of the Anglo-Saxon period of English history.

"When you get involved with the English Companions," he said, "you get started with mead halls." At the same time, he worked on Elizabethan houses that had the remnants of 11th- and 12th-century crucks in them. Plans for a mead hall of his own started percolating in his head.

But years of pouring his heart and soul into the English parliament movement had tired him out, and a divorce from his wife, combined with deteriorating health, finally convinced him he'd had enough.

"Mentally, as well as physically, I got sick of the whole thing," he said.

The United States beckoned. The Rockies had seemed compelling to him even as a youth, and as he researched the states, Wyoming's low population density, proximity to the mountains, less restrictive building codes and dry climate made it especially tempting.

In 2000, he boarded a train and rode across the United States. He rented a car in Denver and drove the length of Interstate-25 through Wyoming. After the dense development and lush greenery of England and New England, Wyoming in August was a bit of a culture shock, he said.

"Everything was burnt up," he said, "No trees, no nothing ... all I could see was this abyss of nothing."

But he found there were trees and mountains in the western part of Laramie County, and the place still seemed appealing.

"England seemed overrun by objects and people," he said. "I wanted space, (and) I just wanted to be left alone."

His English friends were puzzled, to say the least, by his new choice of home.

"What a strange place to go, really," said Tony Linsell, a publisher at Anglo-Saxon Books in the United Kingdom, "seeing as how he so attached to England and Englishness. I think he's so keen to fulfill his dream of building an Anglo-Saxon hall that he went there because it was the only place he could do it."

But the ability to build the hall wasn't he only reason he liked it, he said. The climate, both atmospheric and political, suited him.

His health improved greatly in the West, and he appreciated the Wyoming attitude: "If you don't like it, you can leave," he summed it up. "Which is fair enough, I think."

His ex-wife and three children moved to Cheyenne too. Meadowcroft said he asked her to come so it would be easier to see his son and daughters.

When he first came to Cheyenne, his idea was to cut back and focus on quality of life, he said. For the first 12 months, he didn't work for anyone. He built the small house in which he would live temporarily and started digging the foundation for the hall.

He chose a subdivision in Happy Valley because it was old and its covenants had lapsed, and city building codes had not yet been extended into the county.

A friend in Cheyenne had a cousin in southern Illinois with a farm. With the help of these friends, he braved the tick and chigger-infested woods there to hand-select the trees for the crucks. He phoned a local lumber yard for the rest, bringing the grand total to some 70 oak trees in all.

The trees were piled onto four tractor-trailers and hauled to Wyoming. Six years later, with most of the framing complete, he has used almost all of them, he said.

But soon, injuries in both elbows he suffered while working at another job forced him to quit work on the hall for a year. After 12 months, his doctor said he could work an hour a day. He gradually increased his hours until he could work eight hours a day on the building, though not every day.

Now he works as a school bus driver in the mornings and afternoons and works on the hall in the hours between, on holidays and during the summertime, when the fierce Wyoming wind permits.

When he's finished, he'll put 400 sheets of plywood between the crucks and support beams and stucco them. The top of the crucks will be covered with 200 pine rafters and thousands of red tiles.

Angel Cynn Heall (which means "English Nation Hall") is significant not just because of its size - few other cruck halls exist that are so large - but also because it will have a second floor, he said.

He is building it in honor of his hero, Alfred the Great, an Anglo-Saxon king of Wessex also considered to be the first king of England. By Meadowcroft's reckoning, he began the process of beating back a Viking invasion, started the first colleges for the education of the people, began the English Navy and Army, and laid the foundation for the English common law, of which Wyoming's law code is one of many descendants.

"Alfred is almost completely unrepresented," he said. "I thought (dedicating it to him) would be a good deed."

A good deed, perhaps, a good deal of work, for certain - and somewhat dangerous for one man. Next-door neighbor Julie Daniels says she keeps an eye on Meadowcroft when he's working on the building in case he falls. She is impressed by the enormity of the project he has taken on, as well as his dedication.

"I'm always amazed he doesn't get frustrated by how long it takes," she said. "It always surprises me how positive he is about the whole thing, even though it's such a huge project and takes up so much time. We have smaller projects in our home, and I get frustrated even through (they're) smaller and shorter."

But Meadowcroft has a resolute streak that has, and likely will, see him through whatever future challenges he will face building the hall.

When they campaigned for an English Parliament together, Linsell recalled, Meadowcroft stood outside the British Parliament every Wednesday for 18 months because Prime Minister Tony Blair had to pass that way.

"He's pretty fearless," Linsell said. "He's just got it in his head he wants to do this, and he's quite a determined sort of person."