How to stop your fence blowing down in Cornwall
Updated 23 September 2026
Every autumn the same thing happens along the north coast and across the exposed bits of the county: the first proper south-westerly arrives and a row of fence panels ends up in next door's garden. It is rarely bad luck. It is almost always the posts, the fixings or the type of fence, and all three can be got right.
Why fences fail here
Cornwall gets more wind, more often, than most of England, and the wind is wet. A standard lap panel is a sail: six feet of solid timber that catches every gust. When it is fixed to posts that were set too shallow, or that have rotted at the ground line after ten winters, the whole run goes at once.
The panels are usually fine. It is the posts that have gone. Look at the base of a fallen fence and you will nearly always find the post snapped off level with the soil, where wet ground has eaten the timber.
What a fence that survives looks like
Concrete posts, or timber posts set in concrete to a proper depth, at least a quarter of the fence height in the ground and more on an exposed site. Panels with gaps, such as slatted or hit-and-miss designs, let the wind through rather than fighting it, which is why they last on cliff-top gardens where solid panels do not.
Gravel boards along the bottom keep the panels out of the wet soil. Galvanised fixings do not rust through. None of this is expensive; it is just the difference between doing it properly and doing it quickly.
Check yours before winter
Push each post firmly at the top. Any movement at all means the base has gone. Look for panels bowing or fixings pulling out, and for soil or plants piled against the bottom of the timber, which keeps it wet.
If one post is rotten, its neighbours were set at the same time in the same ground and are probably close behind. Replacing the posts along a run in autumn is a great deal cheaper than replacing the fence and the posts in January.
What Benno can do
New fencing built for the exposure, replacement posts set properly in concrete with the existing panels re-hung, gravel boards added to a fence that has none, and emergency repairs when a run has already gone. He covers the whole of Cornwall and takes storm call-outs 24/7.