Gabion Stone

We deliver all bulk bags on a pallet using a tail-lift lorry. The driver will lower the pallet onto a flat, solid surface like your tarmac or concrete driveway using a manual pallet truck.

Please note that tail-lift lorries cannot crane or hiab the bulk bags over garden walls, fences, or across soft grass and gravel driveways. Delivery is strictly curbside or driveway offload.

Not always. It depends on what the gabion is for.

Decorative gabions (garden features, seating, planters, cladding that isn’t holding anything up): you can fill them with almost anything you like, such as stone, logs, glass or recycled materials.

Retaining walls and other structural gabions: the fill must be:

• hard, heavy and durable
• free-draining, so water can pass through
• frost-resistant, so it won’t crack or break down over winter
• bigger than the mesh openings (75mm on our baskets), and no larger than 200mm

Our granite, limestone and gritstone are graded for gabions, so they tick all of these boxes. For walls designed by an engineer, check the stone they’ve specified (usually Class 6G)

Use angular stone of 80mm and over, so it can’t fall through the 75mm holes. Ours:

• Granite: mostly 80–180mm
• Limestone: mostly 80–150mm
• Gritstone: 100–200mm

Quarries measure stone across its width, so some angular or flat stones will be longer than this. Each bag includes a few smaller pieces: put these in the middle of the basket, not against the mesh.

All three of our stones are sized for 75mm mesh, so nearly every stone is bigger than the holes:

Our stone is freshly quarried, and crushing the rock leaves a fine dust on the surface. It’s completely normal and washes off with the first few heavy showers. For a clean finish straight away, hose the basket down once it’s filled.

Alternatively, the rain will wash it off naturally.

Tipping stone straight from a wheelbarrow creates large empty pockets and puts uneven pressure on the wire joints.

For a neat, straight-edge finish, hand-pack the visible front face by placing the flatter sides of the rocks tight against the wire mesh. You can then fill the hidden middle area behind the front row using a tipping method.  Be careful not to cause too much shock against the mesh; otherwise, you may cause the wires to bulge.

For standard garden retaining walls under 1.5m high, you do not need a poured concrete foundation.

Gabions are flexible, free-draining structures. Simply dig away loose topsoil down to firm ground, level the trench, and compact a 10mm–30mm sub-base of MOT Type 1 or hardcore to stop the heavy baskets settling unevenly over time.

Yes. A popular cost-saving method used by trade builders is “Face-Packing”.

Hand-stack attractive rocks along the front face that people see, then place a Backfilling Panel inside the cage to separate the front face. You can then fill the hidden rear section with cheaper crushed concrete, bricks, or hardcore rubble. This cuts your decorative stone costs by up to 50%.

You can also use local stone or rubble bags, please watch the video below for more details

One 850kg bulk bag fills about 0.45m³ of gabion. As a guide, for any of our stones:

• Small basket (97.5 × 45 × 45cm): 1 bag fills about 2
• Cube basket (97.5 × 97.5 × 97.5cm): 2 bags (only just, so if you pack tightly you may want a third)
• Large wall: just over 2 bags per cubic metre

The amount you use depends on how tightly you pack: hand-packed baskets with a neat face use more stone than loosely filled ones. For an exact figure, use our stone calculator. We always round up to a whole bag, so you won’t run short.