KILLARDRY BANK RECORD · 8 SEPTEMBER 2026
The blue pipe in the bend at Killardry was not a finished drain
TII DN-DNG-03022 puts safety first: speedy removal of surface water. A drain that moves water and leaves mud on a bend has already failed.
On a rural local road the finished options are a filter drain, a designed channel, or over-the-edge drainage to a ditch. An open hole with a pipe in it is not on that list. It is a construction state.
Series 500 is the specification for how a pipe is supposed to disappear into the ground:
bedded, barrel in contact with the bed
level within 20 mm
surrounded to 300 mm above the barrel
backfilled immediately
surface reinstated
inlet set as ironwork, flush to 6 mm low, never proud
The photographs looking into the blue pipe at Killardry show a standard twinwall — black corrugations, blue liner, the type used on Irish local roads every week. You can see daylight at the far end. The invert has a silt film. The rim is chipped. The mouth sits in weeds at ground level. There is no headwall, no grating, no concrete surround.
In the May walk-through the same blue mouth is visible in the right-hand cut as you come around the bend — at about two to six seconds into the video. That places the pipe in the turning radius, not only on a maintenance length “northwest of the bridge.”
On the family’s working timeline the pipe was added about ten days before 24 April 2025, after the bank had already been open about three weeks. Competent work would have closed the trench in the same operation. What the camera recorded in May is the construction state left live: a pipe in an open face.
The Purple Book, which governs openings on non-national roads, adds the end-of-day rules: no spoil overnight; site clean and tidy; silt from the works cleaned from downstream drains. The toe crops fail the first two on their face. The open mouth fails the ironwork rule.
“A pipe in an open face is not a drain. It is an excavation containing a pipe.”
Internal links: Blog 1 (bank), Blog 3 (that night), full review.