Driveways and patios in Downton

Old concrete, broken up and taken away. Getting on for half the village went up between the war and the early eighties, and those houses came with bay-laid concrete drives. They fail at the joints first, then rut where the car stands, then start staining and holding water in the low spots. Concrete cannot be levelled by adding to it, so it comes out: we break it, load the spoil straight into a grab lorry rather than filling your garden with it, and dig down to a firm formation. The depth depends on what is under there and on whether a vehicle is ever going to cross it.

Gravel that has gone travelling. A quarter of the housing here predates 1919 and plenty of those cottage frontages are loose stone over nothing much, which always ends up on the pavement. Two things fix it. A bound strip at the entrance, resin bound or tarmac, so nothing is dragged out onto the highway. Or the whole surface changed to resin bound over a proper base, which keeps the gravel look and stays put. Both need an edge restraint with a haunch of concrete behind it, because a gravel drive without a border is just a slow leak.

The nineties block drives around the village are rarely worn out. They have silted up, the jointing sand has washed out, weeds have taken the open joints and the whole thing has dished where the sub-base was thin. We lift the blocks by hand, keep what is sound, put right the base and the falls, re-lay on screeded sand and re-sand the joints with kiln dried sand brushed and vibrated in. That is a couple of days rather than a week, and it costs a fraction of a new drive.

At the back of the older cottages the ground has usually crept up over the years. New natural stone or porcelain goes down on a full mortar bed with a fall running away from the wall, pointed properly, and set low enough to keep clear of the damp proof course and the threshold. Where the level cannot come down, a channel drain at the wall takes the water instead, and on a garden that falls away we build a step and a low retaining course rather than one long tilt.

Ground here is naturally wet, so nearly every job ends up being about drainage: a gully silted solid, a fall running the wrong way, a garage bay that ponds. Depending on what the ground will actually take we build permeable, dig a soakaway sized from a percolation test rather than a guess, or run a positive outfall to somewhere that will accept it. Approved Document H is the standard that sits behind all of that, and it sets the order those options should be considered in.

There is no rate per square metre, because what is under the surface decides more of the price than the surface does. A postwar semi with a straight run in off the road, a village cottage where the only way through is a gate you can barely get a barrow past, and a bungalow with a frontage wide enough to turn a machine on are three different jobs before anything is dug. On ground this wet, where the water is allowed to go carries a lot of the price. Ask what depth, what sub base, and who takes the spoil.

We cover Downton and the Avon valley either side of it, out through Redlynch and Lover and down the SP5 lanes towards Breamore and Fordingbridge, and Wiltshire Council is the planning and building control authority for this address.

Bournemouth Roofing & Building Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 15471719, which you can look up in a minute. Thomas Hannen's business, and he is the one who comes out to price the job, not a salesman. A verified customer's 10 out of 10 on Checkatrade. The visit and the written quote are both free.