Railway sleepers as lawn edging?

[doglover]

Our beloved chickens love to free-range in the garden but they make a wonderful mess with all their scratching! I prefer a natural, quite rustic look and am contemplating edging the lawn/borders with reclaimed railway sleepers, making sweeping soil/stones/stuff easier. Would this work? Any other suggestions?

I had a vague feeling there was a toxicity issue with railway sleepers, so did a google and found this, which may be interesting to you.

www.pavingexpert.com/featur08.htm

Turns out the toxic ones have been banned since 2003.

The only problem with lawn edging like is that it would be difficult to change the shape of the lawn if you wanted to. If you're happy with the shape of your lawn then go for the railway sleepers but if not then would something like this work?

Just returned to look at any responses - many thanks. I will look at both links. x

we did exactly this to prevent our free ranging chickens from digging up the border. i am very happy with it. our girls have now learnt how to jump over the sleepers into the border but dont usually bother. at least if they do get into the border now all the soil stays there instead of being spread all over the lawn

i bought the sleepers off ebay. very cheap and i like the rustic look. plan to make a bench out of the left overs only had them for about 2 or 3yrs