We are currently on the groundworks and the weather has not been kind. The site is situated near the bottom of a very large hill and, as tends to happen on hills, everyone runs their surface water down into the neighbouring property. It is often a very subtle process, just a matter of putting a slight fall on your patio and drive towards the neighbouring property. In heavy rain, such as we have been having lately, the consequences for the people at the bottom can be serious. Personally I would avoid any site that lay at the bottom of a hill especially in a river valley. Just down the road from our site is a large new retirement development.

It hasn't flooded yet and probably the area hasn't flooded in the past hundred years but we live in unusual times and I am sure that the reason it was never built on was because people remember it flooding. On our site the problem has been more immediate. As we dug the strip foundations they began to fill up and we nipped down to Speedy Hire for a couple of pumps. The pumps had four stroke engines and we expected them to self prime but they couldn't pull the water up that fast. It took us two hours to get them pumping and when we emptied the trenches they all collapsed. In hindsight we would have been better off leaving the water in the trench because the pressure was equalised and it wouldn't have collapsed.

We abandoned the foundation dig and started to cut a 2 metre deep trench around the uphill perimeter of the site as a land drain. A flexible plastic perforated land drain pipe was then laid in the trench and covered with a geo textiles to stop fines (small particles) silting it up. The trench was filled with crushed rock. It has added a few thousand pounds to our build costs and we aren't even out of the ground. The land drains should be an investment and will stop future problems but the moment we finished them the rain stopped. Some times I think that there is some one up there having a game with us. You’d think he/she/it would have something better to do.