Terrace walls in Harrogate

Why a falling garden needs an edge

The slope is the reason a retaining edge exists in a Harrogate garden. The back door wants a level floor, and the lawn often continues further down. We build low walls and firm edges that keep a terrace where we have set it, on hillsides such as Harlow Hill and on village plots that tilt towards the lane, Beckwithshaw among them. A level patio on a falling garden can be cut into the slope, so that most of the paving sits near the existing ground and the edge holds only a modest bank. Where the doors are already high above a steep bank, the outer edge becomes a taller wall and the planning question is on the table with the first sketch. The steps guide shows how the flights between these levels are proportioned.

How high the edge should stand

A single step, held by a sett course or a low stone kerb, feels like part of the paving. The measurement we draw on every sloping job is the height of the finished paving above the ground beside it. When that difference is more than about 300 millimetres, North Yorkshire Council normally expects a planning application before the work is built. We take the figure at the downhill edge, where it is largest, and cutting the terrace into the slope, in more than one modest level, is how that number often stays in a range the council can confirm readily. Conservation areas and listed houses, as at Ripley, can add their own consent for a new wall. The town-centre setting is covered in the Stray guide.

Building the edge so water can leave

We dig the footing into firm ground, below the finished level of the lower lawn. The wall is then built in stone, or in dense units faced to suit the garden. Behind anything more than a low kerb we place a clean stone fill, a sheet to keep garden soil out of that fill, and weepholes or a perforated pipe that can discharge to a border or another outlet allowed to receive it. On Harrogate's glacial till that pipe matters, because the clay holds water and a solid wall with nowhere for it to go will be pushed until the coping no longer reads level. The patio above is built in the same visit: soft spots dug out, crushed stone firmed in thin lifts, slabs set on mortar under the whole of each one.

Stone, porcelain and setts on the held terrace

The face of the edge and the floor it holds should belong to the same garden. Against a gritstone house we build the wall in a sandstone of a similar grain and lay natural stone flags on the terrace. Where the upper terrace is porcelain, because the house is later and the doors are wide, the edge can still be natural stone. Block paving is what we use for the path that leaves the terrace, for a sett course on a very low edge, and for a curve the lawn asks for. A pale wall belongs with the Magnesian limestone towards Knaresborough; a warmer grit belongs on the western hills. The local stone guide explains that change.

Where we build them, and how to begin

These edges turn up wherever the town climbs. Harlow Hill, with gardens falling from the villas on Otley Road, is the classic case of a terrace cut into a hill and held by a low sandstone face. Across all of them the sequence is the one on our areas page: measure the fall both ways, decide how many levels, draw the height at the outer edge, agree the stone with the house, then dig the footing. The useful thing to send is the postcode and a description of how the lawn leaves the house, through the quote form. We will measure, and we will say whether the edge is a sett course, a low stone wall, or a height that needs an application before we build.

Questions