Ashford sits on a patchwork of Atherfield Clay, Hythe Beds, and recent river alluvium from the Great Stour. The town’s expansion zones near Junction 10 of the M20 and the newer residential plots around Finberry often hit soft lenses that standard boreholes miss between sampling intervals. We see this pattern every month in our lab: a client brings SPT logs that look consistent, but the CPT trace reveals a thin peat seam at 4.2 metres that nobody anticipated. With the local water table sitting high—often within 1.5 metres of ground level in winter—undrained conditions complicate any excavation. When we run in-situ permeability profiles alongside CPT soundings, the combined dataset gives a much clearer picture of pore pressure dissipation before foundation design begins.
A continuous CPT trace catches thin silt seams between sand layers that interval sampling misses—and around Ashford’s river terrace deposits, those seams control the drainage behaviour of the whole foundation.
