Gravel Driveway, Paving Setts & Railway Sleeper Construction | Dibden Purlieu

This project was an interesting one as there were a lot of nice materials involved and various methods of construction we had to undertake to achieve what the property owners wanted. They were stuck with an uneven patch of land at the front of the house which was covered with shrubs that grew fast and were difficult for the owner to maintain.

Dibden-Purlieu-Driveway-Before-Landscaping
Before work commenced

The owner of the property had been researching landscaping materials and created a design that they wanted made into reality. The idea was to take out the steep bank of earth and create an auxiliary parking area that was low maintenance but still had some life with planting here and there.

Landscaping-Design-Dibden-Purlieu
The client’s design.

As you can see from the design we had plenty of work to do. To make this vision a reality we dug out the earth and got the ground levels right. We then installed a deep bed of Type 1 scalpings to provide support for vehicles parking on the area and built the sleeper wall that was going to act as a retainer for the flower bed nearest the house. Unfortunately there were parts of the build we couldn’t do due to underlying groundworks and we consulted with the client on this. In particular this meant the plan for the sleeper wall on the boundary had to be removed as there was too much concrete supporting the adjacent pavement there. Instead we decided to continue with the paving setts that were to frame the driveway. The paving setts were great for us to lay as we used some beautiful Tumbled Sandstone Setts supplied by Miles Stone. We were very careful with how we installed these as they needed to be slightly raised against the finished level of the gravel driveway to help contain the gravel chippings. We also wanted to show off the tumbled edges of these lovely stone setts so pointed them by hand using sand and cement and striking the pointing so that it was at least 5mm below the stone sett. The project was finished off by adding a surface dressing of decorative Purbeck stone chippings and adding Scottish cobbles and planting to the flower bed next to the house. Check out the finished images below.

Send comment