Amazing what the elements can do...

[Alice Abbott]

Part of our land has a four feet tall stone wall boundary. I suppose it must be about two to three feet wide, large flat limestone boulders done in a semi dry stone way with a "mortar" which seems to be mud and then capped with cement and stone slabs. It's pretty common around here and appears to be ancient and immovable.

So I was amazed this morning to actually see it literally fall apart before my eyes. I could hear some sort of crunching and looked out of the window to see the boulders just popping out from the middle in a gush of water. We now have a three foot wide hole in the wall - the upper part has stayed firm. Speaking to our neighbors (who travel out of the village much more often than us) this has been quite common this year around here. Water gets under the capping and flows down the inside of the wall, then freezes and so expands. It then melts and eventually undermines the structure so that it explodes.

Last week a rainstorm managed to rip a huge thirty foot ivy bush completely off the side of the house. It was so old and well attached that I couldn't even pry it off to trim it, but a combination of rain and wind did it for me in minutes!

The weather in this area has been awful this winter, I've been checking online and see it's usually even worse than the UK. And now it looks as if we will be starting a new career of wall builders. I think this one will have some proper mortar in it this time though, assuming we can actually pick this huge stones up...

I know this pales into total insignificance when you consider Haiti but has anyone else suffered with the elements this year?

[Millymollymandy]

Not like that! However when it is really frosty and below freezing the ground rises up and we've had a few times when it has been extremely difficult to open up our gates to get the car out! Keep having to kick gravel out of the way then gouge out a bit of frozen ground so that it can open. And we constantly do battle with the back door which swells when it rains and shrinks when it's dry (it's always one or the other here) and I've always got bruises on my knee from pushing it really hard so that I can lock it. Our front door has cracks in the wood and you can hear it popping open on very cold nights or hot sunny days.

Guess it's just life in the country, eh? Or old houses, or a bit of both.

[pumpy]

Never under-estimate the power of water. It has survived on this planet for billions of years, & will still be here after us humans have gone.

[frozenthunderbolt]

Never under-estimate the power of water. It has survived on this planet for billions of years, & will still be here after us humans have gone.

[Stonehead]

We have a tarmac hard-standing that was put down by previous owners of the croft.

Neither they nor the company that laid it appear to have any knowledge of frost heave, so after eight years the lovely, expensive tarmac now looks like a frozen, black sea with ripples, lumps and bumps everywhere.

The problem is that the sub-base doesn't extend below the winter frost layer—another two inches deeper and there would have been much less chance of the tarmac lifting. (Our soil freezes down to at least six inches, sometimes as much as 10. Ground temperature is currently -4C at four inches depth.)

Winter is a good time to cleave stone the old-fashioned way—drill a series of holes along the intended cut line, fill them with water and leave to freeze. Then "crack" and the stone will cleave neatly along the line. It's how my grandfather used to cut stone. (In summer, drive dry wood into the holes and pour water over the wood, but it's not quite as effective.)

[JulieSherris]

During the floods in November, the water got under our roads out here & lifted them... when the water finally receded, the tarmac then went back down, cracked, broken, rendering a lot of roads unusable.
One major route was repaired between midnight and 6am - the poor road blokes were out in the rains trying to get a 2nd route opened into Galway, as the one route left from the north was the equivalent of an english country lane and it was still flooded to a depth of 3 feet, but was the best & only way in & out of the city!

Then came the freezes & ice, frost, snow etc.... now it's all settled down, you can see the damage that has been left all around & it's absolutely horrendous!
We now have the problems of drivers swerving around potholes and we still have entire major routes closed - but you know, the folks here just get on with it.
My granddaughter was getting ferried into school on the back of a tractor trailer for a few weeks - cars just couldn't get through the floods, but they still made sure the kids got to school!

Roll on Spring

[Millymollymandy]

I saw all the reports on pot holes in British roads after the freeze on the telly but we never had any problems with ours here in France, apart from the roads which are a right mess anyway, but that's due to people digging up the road to lay cabling or sewage pipes or whatever. Maybe they lay tarmac roads right here?

[JulieSherris]

And there was me thinking that it was the irish that knew all about tarmac

Like I told another english bod who was complaining about the state of the roads here.... you get what you pay for!!
See, no council tax, no road drainage - not outside of the towns anyway - so we don't mind a few potholes here & there!