I would wake in the morning to the noise of the wheelbarrow crunching the gravel outside the bedroom window as Mr. Broome, the gardener, wheeled it to his work

From Trying to Please by John Julius Norwich.  Page 34.

By the front gate, perhaps two hundred yards from the house, was the Lodge, also vaguely Gothic, tiny, single-storied and with a generous verandah on two sides. It had six rooms, one of them a bathroom, with a little kitchen at the back. Two of the rooms were kept for guests and normally used only when the house was full; one, with two big iron bedsteads, belonged to Mrs. Wales and one of the maids; the other two were the day nursery and night nursery, occupied by Nanny and me. My days and weeks as a child at Bognor were deliriously happy. I would wake in the morning to the noise of the wheelbarrow crunching the gravel outside the bedroom window as Mr. Broome, the gardener, wheeled it to his work; after breakfast I would go over to “the House” to see my mother for the usual reading or lessons in her bed. Then she would either take me into Bognor to buy lunch or Nanny and I would head for the beach.

It is still common in England for large country homes to be approached by lengthy drives covered with river gravel, easily dredged from old deposits.  I have lived in two homes with that feature.  It also described the approach to my old boarding school in East Anglia.  And certainly I have visited innumerable such buildings into the current era, though now most such building repurposed as hotels, country clubs or conference centers.  But all of them approached by river gravel drives.   

The sound of the crunching river gravel is very evocative of another place and another time.