Forgive me if I'm telling you things you already know, but I'll mention it for others, if not for you. Erosion is caused by two things - volume and speed.Anything you can do to reduce either one reduces erosion. The lawn is good because it has a lot of blades that the water has to go around which slows it down and also allows the soil to absorb some (both reducing speed and volume). Also, slope translates to speed. Longer slopes translate into increasing speed. Anything you can do to disperse water rather than concentrating it is reducing volume. Sometimes we combine drainage so that we deal with it in fewer places. But sometimes it is not a good idea because you create a big problem instead of several smaller and easier to deal with problems. Since you mentioned that the path is a convenient way to divert water, it makes me think that it is intercepting water that might be moving across the lawn and concentrating it (making a bigger volume) more or less in a channel that is the path. If it goes downhill on a steady slope, water will build up speed and erode. Interupting the slope with a step every once in a while will flatten the grades between the steps, thus slowing down the water. If the path has a cross slope, the step can divert the water off of the path at that point removing it from joining up with the water that the path is accepting between that and the next step. You may have seen this technique on hiking trails just using logs. Even if the water has to pass over the step, it will be reaching the edge of the step with very little speed. although dropping over the edged of a step will add speed to the water, it has ery little time to accelerate and lands on another slow slope. It never builds momentum. Another good technique is to privide better drainage closer to the source. It seems that you hinted that the driveway may be the biggest source of runoff. I will assume that the water is not channeled in a paved swale that concentrates it, but rather drifts off onto the lawn all along its path. In that case, a narrow deep trench filled with larger stone can hold some volume and provide side and bottom area for the soil to absorb some of it. I would not continue such a trench where the driveway slopes a lot as water would rush along the trench. A retention swale that holds volume and traps it untill the soil absorbs it is an option, but most people don't like to have a puddle or wet area. Some have the space for it and don't mind. Another thing is a detention swale that captures the volume and holds it temporarily by having it drain out in a limited manner such as making the swale drain out of a small pipe that can only handle so much water. It detains the water only to let it go on its way in a controlled release. Compaction of your stone in the path is not really much of a problem for water erosion. Smaller surface stone will wash with less force than larger surface stone. Stone in swales is often refered to as "energy dissipation" material where it takes the force of fast concentrated water coming off of a pavement or from a pipe. It takes the impact and slows the water down in the initial portion of the swale. The slope of the swale will then take over in managing the speed of the water and the stone is no longer necessary. Hopefully, this will give you some insight to help you analyze what is happening on your site and some different ideas on what might be options for your specific situations.

you can lay stone, i have done it! :) i made a fireplace out of it, a few stone walls, a small building foundation. laying limestone walls is not a hard thing to do. what i mean is you don't get out of breath and the rocks aren't so heavy usually that you can't move them, i didn't usually get sore doing the working. the problem is that it takes a long time! maybe if you are an expert mason and full of super energy you could build a huge structure from limestone in a small amount of time. but for me i am slow moving and not so full of energy and it takes me a long time! i would do a bunch of stones in a day, maybe a course of stones if i was lucky and it was a good day. slowly after days and days it would add up and be a bigger construction. but it would take me a long long time to build anything that was really big. also you cannot lay more than a certain number of stones in a day in any case, i think about 2 or 3 courses of stone at most, because it has to set up and cure before you can lay more on top of it. if you have a lot of help, a group of people, i think you could build something quite large. :) you can divide up the workers so someone is running the mixer to make mortar, someone is running the tractor to move stones, etc, and people are all laying stones and moving them around and things, i think you could move lots of stones that way. don't forget also that laying the stone is not all the working, there is also you have to clean the mortar joints up and that takes a lot of time also. the schedule i got on was to lay stones in the afternoon and clean joints the following morning. it would put me into an odd schedule because you always had to plan on being out the following morning after laying stone to clean up the joints, and then while you were already out there you say ok i will just lay some more stone, but then you have to go out the next morning and clean up joints ... but since you are already out there you might as well lay some stone ... lol. you can't ignore cleaning up the joints, that is the most important thing, that is what makes the stone work beautiful. without cleaning the joints it would like terrible. so there you go. there is a lot of things to know about a project such as you are saying. time to pour a footer and get started! :) good luck!

I have a limestone floor. It's sealed with Miracle Sealant Porous Plus...2 coats. Everything still stains and etches it, if left on it for more than a minute and a half (well, that's literary hyperbole, but you know what I mean). Fortunately, mine is SO variable to begin with that you can't tell the difference between what God put there and what my messy son or my clumsy self did. But I'd think long and hard about a sink made of limestone.

raynag - Since I found out we will be living in the same town, I searched for your posts to see if I could help out at all. I started out wanting Soapstone (and have every sample from M. Tex, as well as 4 from Green Mountain Soapstone in VT if you want them). Then I strongly considered Pietra di Cardosa for the matte, dark gray with mild veining look that I craved. THEN, I went to Stone Source's warehouse in Carlstadt (appt. only - see Chris Winnegar). They have no granite, but much other stone, including something I saw on the floor showroom that I fell in love with! You might want to check out their honed Pietra Bedonia, a sandstone. Chris assured me it is wonderful for kitchen counters, and it is what I am going with! It is a beautiful dark gray with dreamy, pale white veining. It doesn't photograph well, so I can't show you my sample. I found Stone Source while I was looking for a less expensive porcelain tile Lagos Azul (limestone) alternative for my mudroom floor and found it in their wonderful Ston Tech Gray 6.0. I'm also using their Hudson crackle subway tile for the shower walls in my guest bathroom. Thought you might be interested in another, local stone source. Here is a link that might be useful: Stone Source