Retaining walls in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Retaining walls in Cape Elizabeth tend to answer the town's rocky relief. Soil survey maps of the eastern shore and the older northern neighborhoods show the Lyman-Tunbridge complex on slopes of 8 to 15 percent and steeper, with rock outcrop mixed in. NRCS describes Lyman soils as shallow to bedrock with very high runoff potential, which is one reason a wall or a series of terraces earns its place on those slopes.
The same ledge that makes a slope worth holding also shapes how a wall goes in. A boulder or granite wall can often key into rock at the toe. A segmental block wall needs a leveling pad and drainage stone behind it, and on thin till the footing may have to step up and down with the bedrock beneath.
What the town ordinance says about walls
Cape Elizabeth's zoning ordinance leaves stone walls and retaining walls out of its definition of a structure, and it names retaining walls, along with riprap, as permanent stabilization measures in the erosion and sedimentation control plan required for permitted filling, grading or excavation in the shoreland district. When a fence is placed on a wall, its height is measured from the top of the wall.
None of that loosens the limits on the digging itself. Within 75 feet of most water bodies and tributary streams, and 100 feet of a Resource Protection 1 wetland edge, the buffer rules restrict cleared openings and bar removal of low vegetation, leaf litter and duff except for permitted uses. A wall in that zone is planned with the permit, the buffer and the erosion plan side by side.
Water pressure behind a wall on Cape soils
Where a wall holds back Scantic silt loam or another of the poorly drained soils mapped in the town's lower ground, trapped water is the usual reason walls lean or bulge. NRCS rates Scantic subsoil permeability as low to moderately slow, so the backfill, drain stone and outlet behind the wall do more of the work than the face stone.
Our standard for every wall is to engineer for drainage and frost before choosing the face, whether that is granite veneer with lantern pillars, a terraced boulder slope or structural block behind a new addition. On Cape Elizabeth ground, that means planning the outlet as carefully as the stone.
Granite · Boulder · Block
How we handle retaining walls
Whether it is a granite veneer entry wall with lantern pillars, a terraced boulder slope or a structural block wall behind a new build, we engineer for drainage and frost so the wall you pay for once stands for decades.
See the full retaining walls service page or everything we do in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.
Retaining Walls in nearby towns
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