Tarmac & asphalt driveways in Macclesfield

Tarmac gets a mixed reputation in this country and almost all of it is earned by bad tarmac rather than by the material. Properly laid — machine-laid or hand-laid over a compacted crushed-stone base, in a binder course and a wearing course, rolled hot and finished against a solid edge — it is a genuinely good driveway surface: seamless, quiet, quick to lay and simple to repair.

Badly laid tarmac is the stuff everybody has seen. A single thin skin of material spread straight over the old drive or over bare soil, rolled with something too light to compact it, and finished with a feathered edge that has nothing holding it in. It looks convincing for a summer. Then the edges crumble, the surface ravels into loose chippings, and the first hard winter finds every weak spot.

Depth and edges are the two questions worth asking. A domestic drive normally wants a binder course and a wearing course over the base rather than one layer doing both jobs, and every free edge needs either a kerb, a block edging or a properly formed and supported haunch. A quote that gives you a price per square metre and no thicknesses is not telling you what you are buying.

Tarmac is also the surface the doorstep trade sells, so it carries a warning the others do not need. The pattern is always identical: an unbooked knock, a claim of material left over from a job nearby, a price that only stands today, and cash up front. Real tarmac is bought hot by the tonne against a booked job and cannot be stockpiled in the back of a tipper for a week. There is no such thing as leftover tarmac going spare in your street.