KILLARDRY BANK RECORD · 8 SEPTEMBER 2026

How a roadside bank at Killardry should have been built

A verge is not a spoil heap.

In Irish design language (TII DN-GEO-03036) the verge is the strip beside the carriageway where drainage lives. On a narrow local lane there is no hard shoulder. Water leaves the grey seal and meets whatever that strip has been made into.

TII Series 600 — the earthworks specification county engineers use as the professional benchmark even on local roads — is blunt about a cut face:

form it to line and level, with falls and a closed-up surface

protect it against erosion at all times

default slope not steeper than 1 vertical to 2 horizontal

keep the cutting drained while you work

A 1:2 face is about 27 degrees. The photograph at the toe of the Killardry cut is not that. It is a bucket face. The next material after the seal is loose stone and wet clods. The hedge-root mat is still on the crest. The machine cut through an existing bank. It did not form a new verge and cover it.

Cover is not landscaping. It is the control that stops April rain turning a three-week-old clay face into fines on the running surface. Topsoil and seed, matting, or at least a temporary mulch — and a drain that actually takes water away from the wheel track — are the job, not extras.

On the family’s working timeline the bank was cut about three weeks before 24 April 2025. The May stills, and the walk-through taken while the horse chestnuts were in flower, show the face still raw. Later summer frames show weeds in bare soil, not a grassed 1:2 channel. That is what “not finished” looks like after the weather has had its turn.

This post does not say the face caused the collision. It says the face was not built the way Irish earthworks rules say a live roadside bank is built.

“A near-vertical clay face with stones on the seal is an excavation. It is not a verge.”

Internal links: Blog 2 (pipe), Blog 3 (that night), full review.