Driveways in Ashmore

Gravel and hoggin, laid so it stays put. Loose stone is the right answer for a lot of Ashmore and it is also the surface most often laid badly. Stone tipped onto soil sinks into it within a season, ruts under the wheels and ends up in the lane.

Done properly there is an excavation to formation, a geotextile membrane, and a sub-base compacted in layers to the depth the ground actually needs before any wearing stone goes down, with a haunched edge restraint or a timber or stone border to hold it. On the sloping sections a cellular gravel grid keeps the crown from washing out every winter.

Stone flags, setts and thresholds are the other half of it. Natural stone and setts go on a full mortar bed, not dabs, with the joints pointed in a mortar that suits what is already there, because a kiln dried sand in the jointing washes out of a sloping joint by the spring and weed follows it. Around the older buildings the aim is a surface that reads as though it has always been there: riven stone, not a sawn edge, a sett apron at the entrance instead of a kerb line, and the fall taken away from the walls. Porcelain has its place on a newer house, but against old walls the stone is nearly always the better match.

Paving against old walls. A good many buildings in and around the village predate any damp proof course, and that changes the detail completely. Butting a new terrace hard against an old wall at the wrong level pushes wet into it and shows up inside as a tide mark within a year. The safe build is a lower finished level, a fall away from the building, and a drained gap or channel between paving and wall. The same goes for a terrace and its step down to the lawn: see patios in Ashmore.

Longer accesses off the lanes pothole where water sits and where the wheels turn. The repair is not more stone on top, it is finding where the water runs, cutting a cross fall or a channel drain to a positive outfall such as a ditch, then reinstating the base and rolling it. On chalk downland the ground shrinks and swells with the seasons, so a crack across one bay, or ponding in a single hollow, is often just that, worth putting right on its own. It is no reason to replace everything.

Access decides more here than the surface does, and no fair quote is a rate per square metre. Getting in. A cottage on the lane with no off-street space, a house behind a wall with an opening built for a smaller car, and a place up a long track have little in common. One takes a machine and a grab lorry at the door. Another is barrow work through a side gate, with deliveries waiting in the lane.

The ground. Up on the chalk the soil is often a clay that shrinks and swells. It needs a deeper, well compacted sub base, with a membrane beneath, so the drive does not heave or rut, and the dig depth follows from that.

Where the water goes. On clay a soakaway may not drain, so a permeable surface needs a planned outfall. Approved Document H sets out how surface water should be dealt with.

The surface. Gravel suits a rural setting but needs a firm edge and a grid, while block paving and resin need a firmer, more exact base.

The muck away. Spoil taken out in small loads down a lane costs more than one big grab lorry.

Whoever else quotes, get them to state the dig depth, the sub base, the drainage and who carts the muck away.

We lay drives in Ashmore and the villages across the Chase, out through Sixpenny Handley and the SP5 postcodes, working from Bournemouth. Our base in Boscombe is 19.7 miles from the village. Dorset Council is both the planning authority and the highway authority for a dropped kerb.

You deal with Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719. It is Thomas Hannen's business, and he comes up to measure and price the drive in person. A verified customer's review on Checkatrade gives us 10 out of 10. You pay nothing to have us come out, or for the written quote with its itemised lines. Before you book a visit in Ashmore, you can read our customers' Google reviews, word for word, on our reviews page.

Most repairs in Ashmore need no application at all. What decides whether a change to the outside of your house does is who the council is, whether a conservation area or a listing applies, and whether the place sits in a protected landscape.