Not seen this before, a long downhill farmers track across a long grassland covered mountain slope with weir like loose rock heaps across to stop the track turning into a torrent and erode the ground away. The ground cover is actually in many places rather thin, seen road cutouts where the soil is barely 15 cm top of loose rock.
I have no ground imagery but absent any form of shading, think these rock lines were dug into trenches in what seems methodically at a slanted angle at every somany meters, where the slope is both north-south and east-west i.e. rain water will come down from the SW, flowing mostly to the NE (derived from the elevation gradients overlay).
Almost works like rock filled culverts at the surface, certainly a weir-ish function to prevent the track turning into a torrent when raining, and it pours here when it does. An area along that track showing erosion which makes it clear the water is trying to seek the way of least resistance
Edit 2: In the end did location a stream trace leading to one of those rock lines across the track… kind of a surface culvert, rock filled instead of grate covered.
Thx, the wiki actually mentions to add access=* for vehicles that can get across… being likely barely above surface it would be access=agricultural…
The conclusion after mapping each and looking in detail at the positioning and elevations (JOSM NASA plugin to 10cm exact), they’re all in the flow direction of run-off water, i.e. kind of surface like culverts. Think to remember there was a topic on the matter with a photo showing a metal lined gap in the road narrow enough to drive over…
(Read long time ago about a farming technique in the Sahel filling trenches with stones. Helped irrigation in some way. Here they actusally dump rocks into gullies, stops erosion, slows down run-off waterflow.)
This seems to have been added as a relatively recent (in OSM terms - 2016) addtion to the wki page for Tag:barrier=debris - OpenStreetMap Wiki. There’s a potential problem with access tags being used to describe physical conditions because there may be actual legal access rules that also need to be added (see discussions ad nauseam elsewhere in the forum), but barrier=debris and access occur relatively rarely together, and the most widespread value is no.
If doesn’t sound like it is the case here, but such barriers might genuinely reflect a legal access rule (maybe on the whole track that is being used illegally, or maybe just crossing the barrier isn’t allowed. I’ll amend this wiki page accordingly to link to the general access page, which has all the detail.
Not needed since the track is grade5 (see above), bare_ground and grass covered. Since there are 17 in that way, the journey would stop a 1 and 17. But that’s not reality. The 4 wheel traces are straight along the way, not bypassing, i.e. tractors go across those heaps.
I’d still add it (i.e. I wouldn’t try and second-guess the routers here). “the ground may be soft” and “the ground clearance of a tractor are required” are very different issues. If it has been try for 3 months on ground that may be boggy someone may consider driving over a tracktype=grade5, and are familiar with the area and what the conditions are likely to be.
Come across signs indicating maximum vehicle length at humpback bridges and elevated rail crossings, not once something which actually says how much free space below the vehicle to work with, closest and only sign in the IT collection that I could find.
At any rate, it’s so deep into the mountains in a valley plain with few animal farms, sheep, cattle, a driver of a street car would think twice before developing desire and wander here… 4WD territory.
While that’s a perfectly valid tag, it’s normally (as the wiki page says) used for indicating where long wheelbase vehicles may have problems. Obviously they would with yours - but so would normal vehicles too.
An example that I know that is tagged in OSM is here (apologies - Google Street View link). The hump there really only does affect long vehicles. The risk of grounding sign is here.
For your example, I’d have thought perhaps smoothness=horrible (or some other more appropriate value)?
