Manhole cover with vent - can I remove the vent?

[pipedream72]

Hi, I'm trying to lay some sleepers in my back garden but have a manhole cover that I need to go around. That's fine, but about 2 feet from the cover there is a ceramic pipe about 4 inches in diameter that comes up out of the ground. It comes up right where I want to lay my sleeprs.

I've dug around it and can see that it is joined to the body of the manhole about 6 inches below the level of the cover.

I figure its some sort of vent but I've never seen this before with a manhole. The house is 1930s so I'm wondering if this is just something that was needed back then and maybe is redundant now.

Basically I want to just fill it in and put a sleeper on top but I'm concerned that I might cause some sort of build up of smelly sewer gases and end up blowing up my new back garden!

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Steve

[bd3cc]

Would redirect it so that it missed the sleepers, but not remove it.

[pipedream72]

Folks, just wanted to let you know what happened with this. In the end I got Southern Water round to look at the vent. The guy lifted the manhole cover and you could see the pipe from the vent joining the body of the manhole about 12 inches below ground level.

He said I was ok to cover it over but that this might risk unpleasant smells being released from the manhole cover, instead of the vent. Given that the vent was only about 2 feet from the manhole, that didn't seem to be an issue and he said that usually such a vent would be some way from the cover to take the smells away from the house.

So, I covered it over and haven't had any sort of methane based explosion as yet.

Cheers.