New Road!

At last, after a raft of complaints we are getting a new road. Murdo and I went to inspect the progress. They used a planer at the road end to do a proper job at the junction. The rest of the road is just being overlaid, which is bad enough but they are using an open graded asphalt! The water will just feed down to the impervious existing road beneath and form a separation layer, which will obviously go through a freeze/thaw cycle and within a year we will be back in pot hole heaven. Not only that they are feathering the edges in places (it gets thinner and thinner to a point where it has no structural integrity whatsoever). The edges around the ironwork are not being sealed with bitumen, again water gets in, freezes and yay, pot hole! Doing the job on the cheap is just going to cost them in the long run. (I’ll blip the surface water later in the year because of the changes in levels, it has nowhere to go). There are actually British Standards and European Norms on road construction, but I guess they know that.

Still it beats the efforts they wasted money on last May (link) and the time before that when the patching repairs actually made the road worse by collapsing the verges with their roller.

I am really looking forward to a month or three with a silky smooth road though, especially in the land rover which clatters noisily over every unevenness on the road. The old road was an absolute mess.