Hard Porous Pitch Maintenance: 15. Top-dressing

During the summer, especially in exposed sites where the wind continuously blew across a surface, excessive drying of the hard porous material could take place and the finer particles could be more readily blown away.

This would affect not only playability, because the water binding nature of the profile became lost and a looser surface was produced, but also future maintenance work because the ratio of different particle sizes became unbalanced, meaning additional top-dressing was needed to maintain a suitable mixture which bound well when watered.

The need to top-up and incorporate new material was essential if a suitable water-bound surface is to be continually produced over many years.

A typical quantity of top-dressing that would have been applied to a full-sized surface of about 6,000m2 over a year was about 4 tonnes.