Driving to Perfection

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Dealing With Sinkholes

Most muddy spots can be cured by raising, compacting, and ditching the drive. But where rainwater stands in a pit, or groundwater bubbles up in a perennial or wet-season periodic spring, you have a sinkhole that must be bridged or drained. Our own sinkhole is only six feet long; while it is dry for most of the year, ground water wells up to within six inches of drive level for one week each spring. A neighbor solved a similar problem by cutting out mud in order to accept a couple of tons of inch-thick boiler plate he had delivered, and dropped in place by a rigger.

I chose to do it the old-fashioned-way — building a mini-corduroy road over a Roman-style rock footing. I hacked out the muddy area (with a pick mattock) down about 18 inches so that it revealed the spring, which indeed flowed slowly off to the East; it just rose too near the surface. I spaced good-size rocks about an inch apart in the bottom of the spring, and then I filled the spaces between them with large gravel in order to keep the water flowing. Over the rock I laid a foot-thick mat of six-foot-long sapling poles, and oriented up and down the drive. Over this, I laid cross-drive poles, and then topped it all with gravel, and kept throwing on gravel as we drove over and compacted the road. I anticipate having to add gravel each year... and periodically having to dig out and rebuild the whole thing.

Don't let something as
comparatively minor as a driveway dampen your
joy... plan and build your
drive well.

Corduroy and Other Styles

What I built was a small version of the floating mat road that has been used for centuries to bridge swamps and bogs. If you have a section of undrainable marsh or mud hollow to traverse, you might build a larger rendition. The time-tested method that resembles one (a thousand years old) found in Europe, is to interweave a road-size mat of thin branches in an alternating fore-and-aft / side-to-side cross-hatch pattern over the marsh. Stake each layer into the mud with down-forking branches. When the mat floats enough to support your weight without bouncing, lay on 6"-thick logs, butted tight together across the road. More poles can be nailed lengthwise to the bottom layer; a third layer can be spiked on top of that (crosswise) for a bumpy, corduroy effect. For a smoother road surface, spike on thick oak planks from a local lumber mill (if you can afford them).

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