Retaining walls in Freeport, Maine.
Freeport's northwestern corner, toward the Pownal and Durham lines, is described in the town's Comprehensive Plan as rolling hills with steeper slopes that drop toward the coast. Much of that grade is Suffield silt loam, which the NRCS says is commonly found on ridge sides at 8 to 20 percent slope and can run to 45 percent on escarpment margins. Those are the slopes where a granite veneer, boulder or segmental block wall earns its keep.
Near the water, a wall is also a regulated structure. Chapter 65 has a specific rule for low walls inside the setback, and the town's bluff maps change where the setback is measured from.
Suffield silt over clay
Suffield soils carry a silt loam mantle over silty clay, with moderate permeability near the surface and slow or very slow permeability below. Behind a wall, that profile traps water against the back of the stone. We plan every wall with free-draining backfill, a perforated drain at the footing and an outlet that daylights downhill, and we set the base below frost on compacted stone rather than on the native silt.
Freeport's zoning also sets a limit for fill left in place: where an embankment remains after a fill operation reviewed under Section 525, it may be no steeper than three feet horizontal to one vertical. A wall is often the cleaner answer when a graded slope at that pitch would swallow a yard.
Suffield's surface runoff is rated medium to very rapid, which is one more reason the top of a wall needs a swale or collection point.
The shoreland wall exception
Walls built for shoreline erosion control are exempt from the 75-foot structure setback. A landscape wall that is not doing erosion work can go inside the setback only if every condition in Chapter 65 is met: the site was already altered, the wall is at least 25 feet from the high-water line or wetland edge, it stands on legally existing lawn or eroding ground, and the walls together total no more than 24 inches in height.
The ordinance also requires the ground behind such a wall to be revegetated with no later patios or decks in the setback, and a native-plant buffer within 25 feet of the water where none exists. On Freeport's mapped unstable bluffs, the setback is measured from the bluff top, so a terrace wall on those sites is drawn from that line.
The Comprehensive Plan counts 7.5 miles of unstable and 4.9 miles of highly unstable bluff in Freeport, so this is not a rare case on the water side of town.
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 Freeport, Maine.
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