Crushed shell driveways in Brewster
Long wooded approaches set back from Route 6A, on ground that shifts between the moraine ridge and the bay.
The town of long driveways
Brewster has more long, wooded, set back driveways than anywhere else we work. Houses sit well off Route 6A behind pines and oaks, and the driveway is not a parking space, it is a road you own.
That changes the job. On a fifteen foot village driveway the surface is nearly all of the cost. On a two hundred foot wooded approach, the surface is the cheap part and the base, the pitch and getting material the length of it are what you are paying for.
It also changes the maintenance. A long driveway under trees collects needles and leaf litter, and that organic matter breaks down into exactly the kind of soft, water holding layer that shell does not like sitting on. Keeping it swept off matters more here than it does on an open lot.
Twelve thousand acres of bay
At low tide the water pulls back off Brewster for the better part of a mile, exposing flats that run roughly nine miles up the shore toward Eastham. They are the largest tidal flats in North America, somewhere around twelve thousand acres, and they are the reason half the town is here.
For our purposes the relevant part is what that shoreline does to properties near it. Low lying ground close to the bay sits nearer the water table, and a driveway there has less room below it for water to disappear into. Where that is the case, pitch stops being a nicety and becomes the whole job.
Ground, and what digging is like
Brewster sits between the moraine ridge and the bay, and the ground reflects it: sandier and easier as you move away from the high ground, firmer and stonier as you approach it. Kettle ponds are scattered right through the town, and where there is a kettle pond there was once buried ice, which usually means variable material around it.
None of this is difficult ground to work in. It just rewards looking before quoting.
Crushed stone driveways in Brewster
Long driveways under the pines
A lot of Brewster driveways run a good distance back from 6A through trees, which is one of the pleasanter things about the town and one of the more demanding things about a driveway. Length means more material, and trees mean more falling on it.
Pine litter and leaf mould show up plainly on a white shell surface and disappear into a gray stone one. That is a genuine reason to prefer crushed stone on a wooded lot, and it has nothing to do with how either material performs. Out toward the flats, where the lots open up, shell is the more natural fit.
Get an estimate
Driveway in Brewster needing work?
We are across Bourne to Orleans regularly. Tell us roughly how big the driveway is and we will come and look at it.
- Free, with no obligation after
- We look at the base, not just the surface
- Across Bourne to Orleans
