Clearing a Campton lot starts with a tape, not a saw. Ten of the fourteen towns along the Pemigewasset carry some kind of shoreland overlay, and Campton’s runs at least 500 feet back from the river’s edge where Woodstock and Bridgewater stop at 250. Add the state’s Shoreland Water Quality Protection Act inside 250 feet of any protected water and a lot of ground in this town has a cutting plan before it has a house plan. We work out which line falls where, then cut to it.
The overlay is the part people don’t see coming. Inside it the town prohibits the excavation of sand, gravel or other earth material outright — not permits it with conditions, prohibits it — along with junkyards, buried fuel tanks, landfills and common lawn fertilizer. Along the river the dimensional rules pile on: 200 feet of frontage per dwelling unit off the ordinary high water mark, 50 feet of building setback, 125 feet before a septic system goes in. And the lot-size arithmetic won’t let you count wetland toward your minimum, or anything steeper than 35 percent.
A setback and a buffer are two different animals, and the difference matters on a clearing job. A setback is a line on a plan. A buffer is living vegetation doing work — holding the bank, shading the water, slowing runoff enough that it soaks in instead of sheeting off. RSA 483-B doesn’t hand you an acreage allowance inside 250 feet of the water; it looks at what is standing and makes you keep a share of it, saplings and ground cover included. So the honest answer to “how much can I take” is that we walk it, mark what stays, and cut around the marks. Sometimes that means a view instead of a lawn. Might cost us the job. That’s fine.
Campton is also the line where the woods themselves change, and it shows up in the work. South of here the dominant habitat is hemlock-hardwood-pine — red maple, silver maple, ironwood, white ash, white pine, basswood. From Campton north a far greater share of the ground goes over to northern hardwood-conifer, sugar maple and balsam fir. In practice that means one lot hands you big-crowned hardwood with heavy stumps and the next hands you softwood that comes out easier but leaves a mat of shallow root behind it. Down in the corridor the hemlock-hardwood-pine gives way to floodplain forest growing on silt the river keeps re-depositing. Rich ground. Also the ground that goes underwater, which is an argument for leaving it alone rather than for clearing it.
Get the wetland delineation and a slope check done before you close on a Campton lot, not after. Between the 500-foot river overlay, the wetland exclusion and the 35 percent rule, the acreage you can actually use is routinely a fraction of the acreage you are buying.
We start with the lines. Where is 500 feet from the river, where is 250 from the brook, what does the wetland delineation say, and what is over 35 percent. All of that gets drawn before anybody fires up a machine, because the expensive mistake in this town isn’t cutting slow — it’s cutting the tree that was holding your frontage calculation together.
Then it is ordinary work done in the right order. Merchantable wood leaves as logs where there is enough of it to bother with, and on a lot with decent pine that can knock a real number off the stumping. Brush gets chipped or hauled. Stumps come out with the excavator instead of getting buried in the back corner, which is exactly what you find when you dig on a lot somebody cleared in 1985. Topsoil gets stripped and stockpiled before the machines churn it, then goes back on top once the grading is done.
Erosion control is not a line we add at the end. Silt fence and stabilization go in with the clearing, because on the slopes above the Pemi one hard rain on bare ground is how a job turns into a complaint. Anything opened up inside the buffer gets seeded and mulched the same week. We are not leaving your soil in the river.
Full clearing in Campton runs $3,000–$8,000 per acre for wooded ground. Lots inside the river corridor land toward the top, because the buffer work is slow and hand-heavy and the material gets carried out rather than pushed aside; open ground and sapling brush up on the hillside come in well under it. If there is sawlog value, the logs can offset some of the stumping. We walk it first and give you one number.
It depends where the lines fall. Outside the buffers, essentially all of it. Inside 250 feet of protected water the state counts what is standing and makes you keep a share, and inside Campton’s 500-foot river overlay the town layers its own limits on top. We mark the lot before quoting so you see the real number instead of a guess.
Not inside the river overlay. The town lists excavation of sand, gravel or other earth material as a prohibited use in that district, so material has to come from outside it. Beyond the overlay it is a different conversation, and one that starts at the town office rather than with us.
Both, indirectly. Land over 35 percent can’t be used to satisfy minimum lot size, so on a steep Campton parcel the buildable acreage is smaller than the deed. Clearing the steep part doesn’t change that arithmetic, and it does hand you an erosion problem. We usually leave it in trees.
Stumps come out with the machine and leave the property. Brush gets chipped or hauled off. Nothing goes into a hole in the back corner, which sounds obvious right up until you dig a foundation on a lot somebody cleared forty years ago and find the whole treeline down there.
Frozen ground during a cold spell is kind to a lot — less rutting, less churn. Otherwise late spring through fall is the working season, and the ground has to be thawed for stumping anyway. Mud season is the stretch we will ask you to wait out, for your driveway’s sake as much as the lot’s.
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.
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