New gravel driveways built with a real base, and tired ones regraded, crowned, and drained — so a Gilmanton driveway survives mud season and the next big storm instead of washing down the hill.
A lot of Gilmanton land is a generation into growing back, and reclamation is its own kind of excavation: mowing and grubbing juniper and pin cherry out of old pasture, pulling stumps, removing the rock that every New Hampshire field produces, and grading it back to something you can hay or fence. The town’s network of dirt roads is part of the deal here — beautiful ten months a year, posted and impassable for loaded trucks in mud season, so material hauling gets planned for late summer and fall. Long driveways are the norm; a 600-foot farm drive with proper ditching is a routine Gilmanton quote. Around Crystal Lake the standard shoreland rules apply within 250 feet, but most of our Gilmanton work is upland: woodlot house sites where the questions are hardpan, springs that surface in April, and where to push the stump pile.
Reclaiming a Gilmanton field? Don’t just brush-hog it and call it done — grub the roots out. Mowed juniper and gray birch come right back in two seasons; grubbed and graded ground stays open. And keep the stones: a picked-rock pile is free material for the base of your next farm road.
A driveway that lasts is a structure: geotextile where soils are soft, a compacted bank-run gravel base, and a crushed-gravel or stone surface crowned so water runs off the sides instead of down the middle. Culverts go where water crosses, ditches where it runs alongside. Skip any of those and you buy the same driveway again every few years — that’s the washboard, potholed, washed-out driveway we get called to fix.
We build new driveways, rebuild failing ones, and do the annual regrade-and-crown that keeps a camp road drivable through mud season.
New gravel driveways typically run $15–$30 per linear foot built right (base + surface + crowning); regrading and topping an existing driveway costs a fraction of that. Culverts and ditching quoted per site. Flat quote after a quick look.
Built properly — compacted bank-run base, crushed gravel surface, crowned — figure $15 to $30 per linear foot for a standard 12-foot-wide driveway, more on steep or soft ground. A cheap spread-and-go driveway costs less up front and every year after.
Water is running down it instead of off it. The fix is shape and drainage: crown the surface, ditch the uphill side, and put a culvert where water crosses. Once water has somewhere to go, the gravel stays where you paid for it.
Yes — washboard and potholes are symptoms of a thin or uncrowned surface. We regrade to pull material back where it belongs, re-crown, and compact. If the base has failed we'll tell you honestly and price a rebuild of just the failed section.
Free site walks, test pits before quotes, flat pricing, and a crew that knows Lakes Region ground.
Tell us where the property is and what you’re trying to do. We’ll walk the site, talk it through, and give you a straight, flat quote.
