I need to do something about ours here as we are getting a lot of potholes at the bottom of the slope, I've filled them in once but they washed out pretty quickly but its been hellishly wet here this last year. To be fair I probably needed to hire a proper whacker to compact it in, I just drove the blazer back and forth over them a few times!
We had our drive created in France from nothing, we had to literally drive a cross a field and through a stream for the first few years we owned the house there which was OK if it hadn't been raining, got stuck a few times. The track leading to our property was also very bad but was the responsibility of the village so we had prolonged negotiations over a few years about who was responsible and how it should be done. In the end we came to a deal whereby they'd pay for the track to be paved and at the same time their contractors would build our driveway right to the house and we'd split the cost. This svaed them money as we could have insisted they refinish the track right up to the house as it went around the boundary of our land and past the house which would have doubled the amount the needed to do and would have left us with little to do.
In the end it was win/win for us all as we got a much better driveway than we would have done as it was built by a company called COLAS who build roads for a living including freeways whereas we'd probably have had a local contractor with a backhoe and chucked some stone down
This was my first attempt at making a better stream crossing putting some concrete pipe in and filling with gravel over the top, partially succesful.
This was the view up the washed out old track
first they graded it
then a layer of largeish granite
Big machines!
Final stage before their version of ashpalt
finished view down the same track
This was the view down from the house where we used to drive up
The new drive snaking down
Last year we finally got around to putting up some gates at the entrance, you can see how the road has weathered in.
We're now five or six years on and apart from an annual application of weedkiller and clearing up the dead leaves and sweet chestnuts from the tree halfway down it's great. I can see us eventually doing the same here, altthough our new neighbour thats converting the barn next to our house to live in doesn't own the track (we do) he does have 50% reponsibility for its upkeep and maintenance so we can probably split the cost of paving it..
