Arena Surface - Sand Only?

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Lada

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We're about to finish our self-build arena. The drainage should be excellent, and we're ordering good quality silica sand (labelled as equestrian). So far, so good. However, I've been going around in circles trying to decide on the topping, and am now considering to use sand only.

The arena will mostly be be used by only two horses daily, mainly for flatwork with occasional jumping, and when it's freezing we're unlikely to want to ride anyway.
My biggest concern is losing a lot of the surface to the windy and stormy weather of which we get a lot. Saying that, we get a lot of rain as well, and wet sand doesn't get blown away (I think). We're in a very exposed location in Central Scotland.

Any advice/experience would be greatly appreciated!
 
I had coarse equestrian sand, and that locked together and rode OK in all weathers. I then had an upgrade, and had finer equestrian sand, and that was great when wet, but awful when dry. I mean so awful you could not really work to any degree on it, and sadly we are on a water meter so regular watering was out of the question.

I had a secondhand black ash/rubber surface added, just an inch or two (mostly rubber), and that made it fabulous to ride on, in all weathers, including some frost proofing.
 
We installed ours last summer and used silica sand. It's very well draining. We topped it with 14 bales of high quality fibre topping from Valley Equestrian, sold as clopf through arena companies.

The sand we found in the summer (before it compacted at least) did blow away in the wind and it's in a reasonably sheltered position. The fibre (shredded brand new carpet offcuts) was rotovated in 3 times. The sand since hasn't shifted and the surface is very reliable, kind of grass like. It's very firm with little indentation with the fibre adds a bit of bounce. The rotovating is meant to make the fibres act like grass roots to help prevent it drying out. It did reduce the frost effect, but below -3 or so it froze.

Ours was a self build so we learnt as we went, but I think we did a good job!

A few weeks ago, it was a big cut and fill job!

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big problem with sand only is that it will freeze.. when we lost the rubber on our school through use, we then lost the school whenever it froze.

My yard used a carpet topping and that did not freeze at all (although we are down South!)
 
I always find sand gives a dead feel, but it might just be the ones I've used. I've had the use of a carpet fibre one and it was lovely! Stable but with a bit of give. The horses seemed to like it as well. It was a riding school so got a lot of use and seemed to take very minimal maintenance to be useable all year round, so might be worth looking at :)
 
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