Landowners but. . . . what lies beneath?

We finally exchanged and completed on 8th January and now own a very expensive key. No more squeezing around the gate or nearly knocking over the neighbour's fence as we can finally drive right into the site. Very useful when we needed to collect soil samples last week and get tools as close as possible.

Soil sample bottled in-situ

A quick catch-up for any new readers - we were concerned that there might be some contamination on the site as it hasn't been used as a residence and garden for a long time (>35 years) but has been used to store old cars and appears to have hosted more than a few bonfires. As you can read in our previous post, we negotiated a retention to cover soil testings and up to £4,000 towards any possible remediation costs. Samples were sent off last Wednesday and we just got the report back this evening.

Sample bottles ready to send to lab

The results are not great and, in some ways, not at all surprising. When I was digging out the samples I had to move loads of broken glass and metal out of the way - all buried under the top couple of cm of bramble roots and grass - and it started to dawn on me just how much cleaning up the site is going to require.

There's lots more like this!

Environment Agency "Soil Guidline Values" (SGV) give a first indication of levels of contamination beneath which there is minimal risk of harm to health and so can be useful in interpreting soil test results. Different values (typically expressed as mg/kg of dry soil) are provided for different land uses and we have focussed on "Residential" and "Allotment" (or "residential with plant uptake") uses to make sure that our land will be safe for food growing and for our kids to play in.

The SGV for Lead (Pb) is given as 450 mg/kg for both residential and allotment land use. One of our three samples came back at 985 mg/kg which is more than double the SGV and higher even than the SGV given for Commercial and Industrial use. Another sample came back at 702 mg/kg. The last sample, which was taken from some clay spoil that had been spread over the site, gave a reading of just 41 mg/kg which puts the others into perspective.

Other metals like Zinc and Copper showed high values too and we're checking those against Environment Agency SGV reports and other guidance.

So now starts the process of getting quotes for soil remediation and holding our breath to see if the £4,000 retention will cover it. Fingers crossed that the Community Infrastructure Levy exemption for self-builders comes through soon - but that's a whole other blog post to follwo very soon.