Laying the Courtyard using reclaimed granite setts

The exact details of the rear courtyard and the route of the driveway leading immediately up to it had not been worked out when we started work on the main house, and then as the whole area descended into sea of mud, scaffolding, site cabins and countless crates of stone, it became harder and harder to imagine how one day it might look. It was also not a priority as there were so many other things that demanded immediate attention.

As work on the exterior of the house drew to an end and the site began to clear, landscape architects Barnes Walker www.barneswalker.co.uk  were commissioned to develop a scheme that included not just the area surrounding the house but the entire eight acres of grounds and gardens.

My main priority was to get the area at the back and the sides of the house sorted out so that it did not turn into a swamp as soon as the bad weather started, I had some time ago bought a very large quantity of blue granite setts (cobbles)  and had already laid a 150M drive from the main gates but had stopped 75M short of the house until I knew exactly how that final 75M was to look.

The new designs showed the drive leading up to a new wall and gateway at the side of the house that then opened up into the rear courtyard, I was initially sceptical but once the wall was built I could see what an improvement this has made. The new wall and pillars were built out of the modular cut stone walling system that had been designed for the house.

In all it was an area of roughly 600 sqm, with Colin the architect we worked out when the drains would need to be to take the rainwater away as an area that big cannot be perfectly flat, also a ramp would need to be built up to the back door for wheelchair access to comply with building regulations.

Laying setts is the same as laying bricks in many respects if you start off wrong the more you do the worse it looks and the bigger the problems will become, but if you start off correctly the job will go smoothly and the more you do the better it looks. I wanted these setts to look like they had been there forever, to get this look we used reclaimed stone kerbs and reclaimed Victorian cast iron manholes and grids, the later were extremely hard to find as the current high price of scrap means they are seldom salvaged, presumably they are all taken to China and melted down to make something not nearly as useful and shipped back.

Although I had bought the granite setts direct from the site where they were lifted there were still some with some damage and these needed to be sorted out first if the finished job was going to look right, most were useable and where for instance a corner had been damaged they could be squared off with a hammer and used, so there was very little wastage, they then needed to be coursed as they were in three sizes, four, four and a half, and five inch.

First we put the drains and the kerbs in, once these levels were set the area to be cobbled could be stoned up and the ground compacted to prevent any later movement, string lines are set up and  the setts are laid on grit sand, at the end of the day limestone chippings are brushed between the joints, then for the truly authentic look the setts were bitumen sealed, this can be a messy process with some cleaning of the setts needed afterwards, but the finished job not only looks superb it looks like the setts  and therefore the house have been there forever, exactly the effect I wanted.