Install culverts to channel water beneath the driveway and to run the driveway across the roadside ditch. The simplest way is to lay in tarred corrugated steel tubing (of a size appropriate to the depth and width of the ditch) and build the driveway over it. Lay soil around the culvert in thin layers, compacting each by hand. If your area is prone to gulley washers, get really big culverts even if you need them only a few times a year. Avoid the most common mistake of home road-builders: Don’t get culverts too small or set them so shallow that a heavy flow of water will undermine or overflow the tubing. A heavy rain can carry it away, leaving you with a flowing ditch at the foot of your driveway.

Sink culverts deep enough below the ditch bottom or creek bed so that the water can lay an inch or two of gravel bed at their bottom. Culvert is available in sizes ranging from a few inches to several feet in diameter, with cost appropriate to size. When we broadened the entry of our own driveway, I had to extend the existing foot-diameter culvert by four feet to the east. But I managed to scavenge a length of pipe from materials discarded when a local highway was broadened.

You can buy precast end-baffles for smaller-sized culverts to keep the driveway from falling out, to help keep the culvert in place, and to break the force of occasional floods. It is better road craft, however, to dry-lay stone buttresses around each end of a culvert. The stonework looks better than a plastic or concrete flange or the tip of a bare metal pipe. It adds a finishing touch to the driveway.

Dealing With Sinkholes Most muddy spots can be cured by raising, compacting, and ditching the driveway. But where rainwater stands in a pit, or groundwater bubbles up in a perennial or wet-season periodic spring, you have a sinkhole that must be bridged or drained. Our own sinkhole is only six feet long; while it is dry for most of the year, groundwater wells up to within six inches of driveway level for one week each spring. A neighbor solved a similar problem by cutting out mud in order to accept a couple of tons of inch-thick boiler plate he had delivered, and dropped in place by a rigger.

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