Reasons to choose gravel for driveways and garden paths

The vernacular favourite offers charm as well as challenges, writes Kya deLongchamps who has advice on installation and maintenance

Paying for a professional install is worth consideration for a larger driveway. File pictures

I’m a bit of a suburban snoop. Let’s call it research. Uninterrupted, hard landscaping without a single break to grass is lapping against the public pavements of a majority of our urban neighbourhoods. Cobblelock, slabs, impressed concrete and bruised black tar macadam — it’s handsome, practical stuff. What I don’t notice very often is the formerly popular use of gravel, and many of us will only feel the yield of gravel when approaching a church or visiting a grand house open to the public. 

Let’s look at the charm and challenges of this vernacular favourite.

Starting with its centuries of cottagecore appeal, gravel is relatively cheap compared to unbroken hard alternatives, and it can go places its smooth-walking challengers cannot. Irish stones make beautiful infill with broader, solid paving materials, providing texture, interest, changing colour when wet. Using steps arrested with timber sleepers or stone kerbs, a gravel path can even walk down an incline, but in general it’s not a good choice for sloping ground. Get the substrate right and gravel areas are easily refreshed and can be blended into a change of colour and should provide safe going.

A good look in a suburban or rural setting, gravel driveways depend on a good installation to avoid expensive maintenance. 

The audible crunch of gravel is regarded as a security device — and dogs not deafened by triple-glazing, are alert to it. Rain will (up to point) be pulled down and under gravel and can be guided into a French drain of larger stone.

 Crushed stone is an eco-friendly choice to a point, but nature is ingenious at finding a home in even a rocky desert. 

All gravel will need weeding during the course of the year. Pulling and spot spraying (there are natural hacks for this), we don’t have to poison the water table. Save yourself a lot of trouble by deploying physical interference of a quality, water permeable weed barrier (geo-textile), and ensure you get the right pins, pegs or spikes suited to your choice of barrier to avoid tears.

Gravel is either a single stone type or a geological mix up of sandstone, limestone, basalt, and other stone. It is unique among paving and driveway choices, as it has a fluidity — it moves underfoot and wheels. 

To support cars and regular everyday use — it’s best in a roughly squared up profile, and sharp edges that lock the stones lightly together as it’s put under pressure. Less prone to skidding and depressing into troughs, self-binding, angular (crushed) gravel of 10mm or less can stand alone as footing for paths, driveways or act as infill for contrasting texture and colour with all sorts of other materials.

How to create your gravel path or driveway

You can in theory use anything form fine shingle to larger shattered shales to provide a pathway. Most robust gravel driveways utilise washed, machine-crushed angular stone rather than naturally occurring stones and pea-gravels. Be wary of cheap unwashed quarry gravel. It will bring large amounts of soil, seeds, bits of root and seedlings to your site. This nutrient rick muck could include Japanese knotweed — a major headache. Sample your crushed stone just as you would paint indoors. Most landscaping outlets with give you a good grab to take home. 

Consider any other hard paving or stone types in or around the outside of the house. If there’s a predominant, naturally occurring stone known in the area, that’s often a very good guide, and is likely to be available from nearby quarries supplying loose stone by the ton.

Deeper gravel beds avoid the balding that will damage the weed barrier, allowing opportunist plants to get hold. Go too deep, choose too round a pebble, and you’ll be wading to the front door on foot and producing irritating gashes every time your car or the kids’ mountain bikes pull up in shower of stone.

If you’re just dealing with undulating, pedestrian garden paths, wistful courtyards out in the landscape, and mulching raised beds, varying stone sizes, types, textures, and colours can be used in both romantic, organic, and more modern compositions. All kinds of beautiful stones can be easily found in small or larger bags delivered to your door, to be wheelbarrowed to their final position. 

Preparing the ground, remove any turf, add some crushed stone, and tamp it down. Use a spirit-level set on a plank to check your progress, and keep the chiropractor on speed-dial, as this is surprisingly heavy work. Budget for the inclusion of weed barrier lapped beyond the stone, higher edging material, and stabilisation mats where needed to keep the path from being perpetually rutted.

Ideally, we need level ground to stop gravel from physically shifting due to ordinary use and heavy weather including flooding. It’s a matter of holding it in place — stabilising and reinforcing it. Pierced plastic mats filled and then covered with gravel and covered over are a popular solution to keep stones from skidding or migrating. Available in recycled plastic they come in around €14-€20 per square metre. Better versions include a geo-textile base. On a short driveway, think about combining hard standing for the car, even in paved tracks where the wheels travel across your gravel. Ask your local paving and aggregate supplier for advice.

On a larger scale, careful ground preparation will overcome most of the problems reported with gravel, including heavy weeding, shifting and depression into the ground. Professional installers dealing with areas of proper traffic, will remove any top-soil, explore any drainage issues, compact the stable subsoil with a commercial vibrating roller or plate, install a geo-textile, and then build up the ground. The high-grade, water-permeable weed barrier is added, before layering on larger first, and then smaller diameter stones on the finished surface. 

As many as three layers may be needed to provide a stable, robust surface that’s knitted together. You can replicate this process on a small scale compacting the ground, putting in the geo-textile, and then adding bags of larger to smaller batches of stone poured over the weed barrier — the bigger ones obviously on the bottom. Don’t neglect that barrier because as well as dissuading weeds, it will stop the stone and earth below combining and forming a dense barrier to drainage.

When it's washed up directly onto walls and buildings, containing gravel is not usually a problem. Here, it has plenty of room to swim around and dissolve prettily under shrubs. However, on a standard approach or drive, you’ll need to contain it to retain its depth, or lose it to the borders. At the sides of paths and driveways, edging boards in timber are traditional choice, but you can also deploy concrete, large stones, brick, PVC edging or even metal trim to frame the gravel in. 

For smaller areas and driveways, I fancy Corten steel, which develops a lovely earthy patina but is rust-resistant, strong, flexible (creating pleasing curves) and can channel an old fashioned or modern vibe in most gardens. Modular versions with spikes to thump into soft ground require no digging or deep trenching and are comparable in price to plastic edging that can break and fade over time; 75mm heights in 1m lengths in 1.6mm steel from €11, everedge.ie.

Top money-saving hack 

If you’re short on funds for a new or renovated driveway or boreen, look into a “quarry-process” or what’s termed a “crusher-run”. This comprises of that sub-base of sand, dusty fines and stone that’s compressed to create a good first layer for gravel, and well installed, it can be used alone for an effective rural driveway.