Seem to have hit bedrock while digging up border. Drill?

[NewspaperTaxis]

I've been digging what amounts to a long trench, only a foot or so deep. along one garden border - the mud was clay really and in recent wet weather this became so obvious I thought, okay, as this is the first time I'm going to be painting nice things here for decades, I may as well get it all out, replace it with decent soil.
However... at the far end it becomes clear I can't hack at it any more, the pick axe bounces back! I doubt it is some old Roman patio (!) but it's clear it's the reason that part of the garden gets badly flooded in rainy season - yes the soil is clay but also the rainwater just can't go anywhere, it won't sink through the earth because of this long hard rock or sandstone. It may even extend under the lawn for part of it, another reason why that would be flooded.
My question is - is it normal to get anyone to take a drill to this bed? Do professional gardeners do this? It feels odd to just put nice soil on top of all this knowing that the key problem for the flooding of the garden will still be there.
Obviously I don't own a pneumatic drill.

The only point of taking a drill to it if it’s not actually rock but a buried slab of concrete eg base for a former shed. If it’s solid rock it’s likely to be many feet deep.

If it’s solid rock it’s likely to be many feet deep.

It's likely to be 1000s of miles deep!

You need a pinch bar. I had to use one when removing massive boulders and awkward shaped stone from my garden last year for removing earth to lay sleepers.

I think this is very unlikely to be bedrock... where do you live?!

Next door to the Flintstones?

I'm a geologist. Where do you live? I suspect it's a boulder rather than bed rock is you can hand-dig to it.

Alice

Hi I live in Epsom, it's KT19. I'll try to post a photo later on. I haven't heard of a pinch bar by the way, @Notplayingball

Thanks for the answers so far ... it's odd because the garden has seemed more prone to being waterlogged the last few years, it could just be the impacted clay as well. Or should I get some long underground drainage pipe to take the water away?

My son informs me an enchanted netherite pickaxe might do the job.

Doubt it's actually bedrock if you had clay over it, but if it is, then your only hope is raised beds (I had this in my last garden, but it was pure chalk).

Tbh even with heavy clay a raised bed might be the way forward.

OP, most folk won't have heard of one as they are not commonly used (used frequently on the railways for maintenance purposes though).

Pinch bars are incredibly heavy but they do the job of removing stubborn boulders. It makes light work of it. DH was surprised how many I managed remove on my own.

That literally made me laugh out loud.

Well, here's the offending area. May be much larger than that of course, it's a border next to a lawn and it may go way under - so that would mean digging up the lawn, the right time of year to do it admittedly but...

The picture doesn't add a huge amount - just saying I assumed I could dig or hack further down than that but on that stretch it's solid. Admittedly it's not wide as pictured, but no reason to think it won't be either. It certainly sees ongoing pools of water in the mud while the other part of the trench doesn't as the water's sunk away.

It's probably just a big rock or bunch of rocks that got chucked under the topsoil by the developers when they built the house. They do it all the time. Really messes up drainage. Our last house was riven with them.

The only "bedrock" in Epsom is Chalk, which is white/cream and not usually that hard near the surface.
It's likely to be some buried obstruction or foundation. Depends how old your house is and what was there previously.

Could it be reminds of a WW2 Air-Raid Shelter? Keep digging around to see what colour is is.

Or a WW2 bomb?

Scrape it off and see what the surface looks like. You need to get a bit Time Team to establish whether it's rock, concrete, impacted clay, whether it has an edge, etc.

Agreed

Good luck with it...I had a similair issue a couple of years back but got it in the end using a mattock.
How long is your pickaxe handle? Can you get a really good high swing at it?

Take a really big swing with an axe at a submerged WW2 bomb! You lot must really love me.
I suppose that would help dig up the garden a bit, plus it's over 25ft from the house, or is that insurance clause only relevant to trees!
I will scrape away at it when the weather picks up - gets warmer - this weekend. But I will be doing the last-ditch planting bulbs thing as mentioned in the Garden forum in other parts of the garden!

OK so you aren't going to like this, but either you see how far this rock goes and potentially never stop clearing the area, or you give up and forget about removing loads of clay and just cover the clay with bought in topsoil and make raised beds, or go for a no dig style [cardboard/compost] approach for the plants that you want to put in or maybe just stick to pots in that area.

You could try banging in stakes across the garden to see if any of them go further down into the ground to see how far it goes.

Shelters were placed around 35 feet from the back door. Was there an extension added in the last 70 years?

I bloody hate Minecraft. I've stopped volunteering to go to careers days etc at primary schools because of the cocky 10 year olds who "know more about rocks n that than you Miss" from Minecraft. All those years studying wasted, when I could have been gaming!