Retaining walls in Scarborough, Maine.
The middle of Scarborough is low, wet country: about 3,200 acres of salt marsh, fed by the Libby, Nonesuch, Dunstan and Scarborough rivers on their way to Saco Bay. The Maine Geological Survey explains that when the last ice sheet melted, the sea flooded southern Maine and fine silt and clay settled over the drowned lowlands, the deposit geologists call the Presumpscot Formation. A retaining wall built in that kind of setting is a drainage project as much as a masonry one.
Whether the job is a granite veneer entry wall, a terraced boulder slope or a segmental block wall behind a new house, we engineer it for drainage and frost: a free-draining zone behind the face, a base set below the loose topsoil, and a planned exit for the water collected behind it.
Clay, heavy rain and the load behind a wall
Clay holds water, and water held behind a wall is added weight. The town's 2021 Comprehensive Plan observes that clay has the lowest recharge rate of Scarborough's soil types, the same trait that lets it stay saturated against a wall after a wet stretch. The plan also cites county hazard data showing precipitation from very heavy storms up 70 percent since 1958, with flooding expected to be worst in winter and spring.
In practice that means clean crushed stone and a perforated drain behind block and boulder walls, filter fabric wherever fine soil could migrate into the stone, and outlets daylighted to ground that can take the flow without sending it toward a neighbor.
What Chapter 405C says about walls near water
Scarborough's shoreland ordinance generally holds new structures 75 feet back from tidal water, streams and wetland edges, but it exempts structures that need direct access to the water as an operational necessity and names retaining walls in that group beside piers and docks. The exemption is narrow. A wall that holds up a lawn terrace is not water-dependent, and the buffer rules still govern the vegetation around it.
Inside 75 feet of the water, the ordinance limits any cleared opening in the canopy to 250 square feet and says ground cover, leaf litter and the forest duff layer stay in place, including during construction and equipment operation. On a sloping shoreland lot, a boulder wall is staged so machines and stone piles stay out of that strip.
Subdivision banks in the newer neighborhoods
Census estimates put the median Scarborough home at 1988 construction, and roughly three in ten were built in 2000 or later. Many of those lots were graded for a subdivision street and left with a bank at the back of the yard. A block or boulder wall is often how that slope becomes a flat, usable terrace.
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 Scarborough, Maine.
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Mon–Sat 7:00am – 5:00pm · Based in Cumberland, Maine