It’s welcome news that Dorset Council will be repairing some of the county’s worst residential roads - some of which are ‘like tracks’.

Resurfacing work has started, with around £2m being spent to target ‘defect clusters’ on its minor road network, and includes five roads in Beaminster - Riverside, Flaxfield Road, Hogshill Mead, Monmouth Gardens and Culverhays - as well as Rockway in Shipton Gorge and Church Mead in Toller Porcorum.

Beaminster resident Douglas Beazer has been urging the council for the past two years to sort out the roads.

He said: “They have done extremely well in getting the main road through Beaminster resurfaced during the lockdown period and I wrote and thanked them for doing this.

“I am now very pleased after waiting for so long that they have now done the resurfacing of some of our residential estate roads which, to say the least, were getting very bad, almost like tracks.

“They had done some patching when I first contacted them, but this was not sufficient and after contacting them again they have now done a complete resurfacing job.

“We do thank Dorset Council for doing this work and can now take pride in our roads once again.”

Nearly 50 of Dorset Council’s most damaged residential roads, which currently have a significant amount of reactive repair work carried out on them, or are expected to in the near future, will be resurfaced over the next two months.

To allow this work to take place safely, the resurfacing work will be done under stop and go traffic management, and each site will take around one-day to complete. Working hours will be from 8am to 4pm and will cause some unavoidable noise disruption due to the nature of the work.

Residents are being asked to look out for yellow advance notice boards which will be put out on site before works start and provide dates of the closure on their road.

Cllr Ray Bryan, portfolio holder for highways, travel and environment, said: “This is a much-needed investment in these particular minor roads - which are too damaged for any other road surface treatment and currently take up a significant amount of resource in reactive repairs.

“By carrying out annual inspections on our roads, as well as recording reports by residents, we can prioritise repairs across the Dorset Council area - which has 1,200 miles of residential roads - and these residential streets are at the top of the list.

“We know that many residents have concerns about their roads, and we will continue our work to improve their condition.”