atwifa wrote:

i think there is hope, yes. a good forking (!) every now and again will
work wonders ... but it's long term. be patient.

With you on that one. I moved into a new house and in some places the turf
had been laid on a couple of inches of soil, which I found out, when I dug
to put in a deck, is on a couple of foot of thick clay. The garden drained
very poorly and I had a lot of squeltchy areas.

To start with I used a rotary aerator which puts a couple of hundred holes
per square meter and does it a lot quicker than a fork. This was done every
other month for the first year (along with a good old scarifying to get rid
of the dead/old/weak grass). Along with this a good spreading of earthworms
will help wonders as they help break up the clay and also help aerate the
lawn.

Now I only need to aerate the lawn before the first cut and after the last
cut of the year. The rest of the time the earthworms do the work for me.

Three years on and the lawn drains very well. Even when we had the recent
heavy rains (which left some roads near me flooded) there were no squeltchy
patches.

So a couple of years of hard work and then turning to nature should do the
trick. If not perhaps some wet soil loving plants or trees might help
recover the situation.

Peter