Digging a trench

In May 2010 I had to exercise “un droit d’echelle”. This law means that a neighbour can access another neighbour's land for maintenance and repair of property ensuring that any damage to their property is corrected, that is, left in the state that you found it in.

We needed to dig a trench along the length of the exterior wall of my property which is in my neighbour’s courtyard.  The exterior level of the land is one metre higher than the interior level of the house. We had to make sure that the walls could breathe outwards!  We discovered that they were damp because cement from previous building work had been dumped alongside the exterior wall. This was not allowing water to drain away. No wonder the wall by the chimney breast was very damp! We also discovered that rainwater was overflowing from the gutter and although the waste-pipe took the water through the thick stone wall to my garden, when it arrived there it was just being discharged straight onto a different wall and down onto the ground!!!!!

First of all we scraped away the top layer of gravel from a width of about half a metre.  But our tools were not 'man enough' so we had to hire a jackhammer to break up the earth, cement and concrete, before scooping out the earth, stones and cement down to a depth of one metre with old saucepans using old saucepans and our hands!  Useful large stones were saved to back-fill the trench.  The rest of the rubble was taken to fill in holes on a public chemin where tractors had caused ruts. It was scorching hot and thirsty work so we had to start before the sun burnt our backs.  Once the trench had been emptied we purchased new gravel of the right size and poured this onto the layer of larger stones that we had returned to the trench.  It was a good job that we owned a trailer but the jackhammer necessitated two journeys of 34 miles to collect and then return.  It was noisy, difficult and dirty work but we did it!  At the time we hoped that the work would be one factor towards a dryer internal stone wall. I think it has paid off.

There are some photos when I locate them.