Crushed shell driveways in Sandwich
The oldest town on Cape Cod, where a shell driveway suits the house better than blacktop ever will.
Sandwich was settled in 1637 and is the oldest town on Cape Cod, and you can read that in the housing stock. There are properties here that predate the country, sitting on lanes that were laid out for carts. Asphalt looks wrong in front of a house like that. A shell driveway, which is roughly what would have been underfoot when the place was built, does not.
Old houses, awkward driveways
Working on older properties is a different job from working on a modern lot. The driveway is usually narrower than a contemporary one, often curves for no reason anyone remembers, and frequently sits closer to the house than current practice would allow. Sometimes there is no proper base under it at all, only a century of material pressed into whatever was there first.
That is not a problem, but it does mean the estimate is worth doing properly. We would rather dig a test hole and find out what is under your driveway than assume, quote, and discover on the day that the whole thing needs excavating.
Ground conditions here
Sandwich sits largely on the Sandwich Moraine, which is the ridge of till the glacier left along the north of the Upper Cape. Till is a mixed material: sand and clay together, with cobbles and boulders through it. It holds water in places where clean Cape sand would not.
Practically, that means two driveways a mile apart in Sandwich can behave completely differently in the same rain. Where there is clay under the surface, water sits, and where water sits a loose driveway will rut. Getting pitch on the surface matters more here than it does on the outwash plains further south.
Villages we cover
Sandwich Village, East Sandwich, Forestdale and the properties out toward the Scusset side. If you are near the canal on the Sandwich side we are there regularly.
We also work either side of here, in Bourne, Barnstable and Mashpee.
Crushed stone driveways in Sandwich
Moraine at the top of town, outwash below it
The Sandwich Moraine runs through the north of town, which is why the land behind 6A rolls the way it does and why driveways up there are so often short and steep. South and west of it the ground flattens into outwash sand.
Those two halves want different surfaces. On the kettle terrain near the moraine, crushed stone holds a pitch that shell would slowly walk down. On the flat outwash, shell is the easier and better looking choice, and it drains through sand about as well as anything can.
Villages in Sandwich
Each one has its own ground and its own quirks. These go into what that means for a driveway there.
Get an estimate
Driveway in Sandwich 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
