Granite setts are laid on a full mortar bed over a compacted sub-base, not on sand and not on spots of mortar. For a driveway that means excavating 250 to 300mm, compacting at least 200mm of sub-base, bedding each sett on 30 to 40mm of semi-dry mortar, and pointing the joints once it has gone off. Get the depths right and a sett driveway outlasts everything around it. Get them wrong and it fails in a winter.
There is also a question worth asking before any of that, which almost nobody selling setts will raise with you: where the stone actually came from.
What you are actually buying
The UK sett market runs on imported granite. Most new setts sold here are Chinese, quarried in Fujian and Shandong, with Portuguese and Indian material also widely stocked. The stone is generally sound and the prices are keen. It is simply not British.
Britain used to be one of the great sett-producing countries. At the peak, roughly 150 quarries were cutting them, and the regional differences were obvious enough that you could often tell where a street came from:
- Cornwall: silver-grey, coarse-grained. See Cornish Granite.
- Scotland: a wide range of igneous rock, with Aberdeenshire the best known. See Aberdeen Granite.
- The Midlands: pink and red, coarse-grained.
- North West England: fine-grained dark grey to black.
- Wales: a greenish grey.
Quarries first opened near the coast, because setts travelled as ship ballast into London and Liverpool. The canals in the 1830s and the railways in the 1840s and 1850s changed that, and for a while the stone under a given street was decided by which railway company served it.
Then it stopped. By the middle of the twentieth century, tarmac and concrete were far cheaper, sett production in Britain ended, and millions of setts were simply buried under asphalt. From the 1960s, as gas works, dock estates and railway yards were cleared, they started coming back up.
So reclaimed setts are not a style choice, they are the only route to British granite. That is also why they cost what they do: you are buying a hundred years of wear that cannot be manufactured.
Sizes, and what the old ones tell you
Victorian setts were made to a standard that still shapes what you can buy. Widths ran to a constant 3, 4 or 5 inches, depths were around 6 inches, and lengths varied randomly from about 6 to 12 inches. In London, 3, 4 and 5 inch cubes were normal.
Modern metric equivalents you will see quoted:
| Size | Typical use |
|---|---|
| 100 x 100 x 50mm | Paths, patios, edging courses |
| 100 x 100 x 100mm | Driveways, heavy-use edging |
| 200 x 100 x 50mm | Patios, decorative banding |
| 200 x 100 x 100mm | Driveways, the common driveway sett |
Thickness is the decision that matters. 50mm is fine for a patio, a path or an edging course. Use 100mm anywhere vehicles run regularly, and treat “will a delivery lorry ever cross this?” as a yes. A 50mm sett on a driveway will crack, and it will not matter which granite it was cut from.
Cropped or sawn
Cropped setts are split rather than cut, so every face is riven and dimensions vary by a few millimetres. They want wider joints, they read as traditional, and they are the cheaper option because less processing has gone into them.
Sawn setts are cut on some or all faces. Dimensions are consistent, joints can be tight, and the result reads as contemporary. Sawn and tumbled sits in between: cut for accuracy, then tumbled to knock the edges off.
The choice drives the joint width, so make it before you order rather than after.
How to lay them
Excavate 250 to 300mm for a driveway. A path or patio taking foot traffic only can come down to roughly 100 to 150mm of construction.
Lay and compact the sub-base to at least 200mm, or 250mm if you are on clay. Compact it in layers rather than all at once. This is the part that decides whether the job survives, and it is the part people cut to save money.
Set the falls before you lay anything. Water has to go somewhere, and it is far easier to build a fall in than to correct one afterwards.
Bed every sett on a full mortar bed of 30 to 40mm, mixed at roughly 4 parts sharp sand to 1 part cement. On anything taking vehicles, use a semi-dry mix: it grips better and holds the sett where you put it.
Never spot-bed setts on a driveway. Five dabs of mortar under each sett leaves voids, the voids fill with water, the water freezes, and the sett lifts. Full bed, every time.
Joints: 3 to 5mm for sawn setts, 8 to 15mm for cropped, where the size variation needs somewhere to go.
Point once the bed has gone off. A brush-in resin mortar gives the most durable and weed-resistant result. Traditional pointing at 4 parts sand to 1 cement is cheaper and looks right on reclaimed work, but it wants more maintenance.
The drainage rule that catches people out
In England, paving more than five square metres in front of a house with an impermeable surface and no drainage provision needs planning permission.
Setts pointed with resin mortar are impermeable. Most front driveways are more than five square metres. So this applies to a great many sett driveways, and it is routinely missed until someone asks.
There are three straightforward ways round it: drain the surface to a lawn, border or other permeable area on your own property; fit a soakaway; or run a channel drain to one. Any of them is cheaper than lifting a finished driveway.
What they cost
Supply prices for new setts in 2026 run at roughly £35 to £65 per square metre, with standard driveway grades commonly quoted around £47 to £65. Reclaimed setts trade by weight, at roughly £120 to £250 per tonne.
Three things move the number:
Finish. Cropped is cheapest because it is barely processed. Sawn on all faces is dearest. Tumbled sits between.
Colour. Silver and mid-greys are produced in the largest volumes and price most keenly. Blacks and charcoals, and speciality pinks and yellows, cost more because grading is stricter and production runs are smaller.
Weight. Setts are heavy and delivery is priced accordingly. Work out your area properly before ordering, and order the whole job at once so it comes off one batch.
None of those figures include groundwork or laying, which on a sett driveway is the larger share of the bill. Setts are slow to lay compared with slabs, and that labour is where the cost sits.
Finding someone to lay them
Sett laying is a distinct skill. A good sett driveway has consistent joints, true courses and correct falls, and the difference between a skilled job and an unskilled one is obvious from the pavement.
Browse stonemasons and paving contractors across the UK and Ireland in the found.rocks directory, or read how verification works before you shortlist anyone. If you are choosing the stone rather than the trade, the Stone Library covers the British granites above in detail.