Gutters and drainpipes

Leaking onto wall

Gutters & drainpipes - not the most romantic thing about buying a chateau but still very important. If you see the size of the chateau roof just imagine when it rains. So much water is collected in a short period of time and it has to go somewhere. Sadly due to lack of maintenance a lot of that water has been going into the chateau walls. In the first photo you can clearly see the water from a broken gutter going directly onto the wall and all the moss that has grown there. Over the last few days I have been replacing the old drainpipes and checking out the gutters - no easy job when you consider that the top of the towers where some of the guttering is stands at 10 metres high! There are

Bodge job

so many ares that have needed attention, I have been walking around the chateau walls in the pouring rain to see just where water is coming down because of failures in the gutters and drainpipes. Some of the pipes are a total bodge job as you can see in the second of the photos. I have discovered that in most cases the drainpipes are just totally clogged up with leaves - one pipe was totally rammed full for 4 metres of its length! When the pipes are clogged up with damp rotting leaves they beak and then need replacing. Another problem is that in some

Filling up the moat

places where you get a channel in the right angle of the roof so much water is concentrated into one spot that it just launches over the top of the gutter - this will have to be redesigned and higher barriers put in place next summer. What I have been able to do now is replace all six main drainpipes from the towers and clean out the leaves from the gutters. Everything is now flowing much better, the drainpipes link into a drainage system that takes the rainwater into the moat and this is now starting to work well again as you will see in the last photo.