Earth banks
Has anyone had an experience of making or being involved in making an earth bank? We need to have a new one built at the end of our property/field to make a boundary between our and our neighbour's land. Any advice would be of interest.
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Taking a guess at what you mean: Soil generally 'rests' at about a 45 degree slope. If you need to make the sides steeper than that you'll have to use some sort of retaining element to make it safe. At 45 degrees, that means it is as high as it is wide ON EACH SIDE, so if it's a free-standing bank in a flat field (say) and you want to make it 2 metres high, as a simple earth mound it will possibly have to be 4 metres wide at the base. If the soil is very sandy, it might 'slump', so could need to be less than 45 degrees slope (i.e. even wider). If it's heavy clay, it might still hold together when the sides are almost vertical, especially if you're compacting it well as you build it and as long as it's not raining.
Round here the traditional banks have a battered stone face - i.e. like a dry stone wall that is leaning slightly into the bank, with earth in the middle and some big stones that go right through to 'tie' the two faces together. That allows the 'hedgebanks' to be much narrower. They are still usually a good metre wide for a 6 feet high bank to keep the sheep in.
Grass is not structural. It won't resolve the basic construction problem. It will just hold the surface together until a hard frost or heavy rain, at which point the bank will probably begin to collapse.
Is that what you were asking? If you want some planting suggestions, it's much easier to answer
― Terry Pratchett
We've done nothing to it and it is now covered in wild plants and weeds which will one day be grazed and it is all holding together despite having 2 years' worth of rain starting just a month after it was made.
The trick is to get a "man who can" with a digger. Ours is a magician.