Everything about Dike Construction totally explained
» For other uses of dike or dyke (and combining forms) see Dyke.
A
dike (or
dyke) is an artificial earthen wall, constructed as a defense or as a boundary. It is also known in
American English (notably in the Midwest) as a
levee, from the French word
levée (elevated). The best known form of dike is a construction built along the edge of a body of water, to prevent it from
flooding onto an adjacent lowland. Dikes can be mainly found along the sea, where dunes are not strong enough, along rivers for protection against high-floods, along lakes or along polders. Furthermore, dikes have been built for the purpose of
empoldering, or as a boundary for an inundation area. The latter can be a controlled inundation by the military or a measure to prevent inundation of a larger area surrounded by dikes. Dikes have also been built as field boundaries and as military
defences. More on this type of dike can be found in the article on
dry-stone walls.
Dikes can be permanent
earthworks or emergency constructions (often of
sandbags) built hastily in a flood emergency. When such an emergency bank is added on top of an existing dike it's known as a
cradge.
Dikes were first constructed in the
Indus Valley Civilization (in
Pakistan and
North India from circa 2600 BC) on which the agrarian life of the
Harappan peoples depended.
The modern word
dike is most probably derived from the
Dutch word "
dijk", where the construction of dikes is well attested since the 12th century. The 126 km long
Westfriese Omringdijk, for instance, was completed by 1250, and was formed by connecting existing older dikes. The Roman chronicler
Tacitus however mentions the fact that the rebellious
Batavi pierced dikes to flood their land and to protect their retreat (AD 70). The Dutch word
dijk meant originally both the
trench or the
bank. The word is closely related to the English verb
to dig (EWN).
In
Anglo-Saxon, the word
dic already existed and was pronounced with a hard c in northern England and as
ditch in the south. Similar to Dutch, the English origins of the word lie in digging a trench and forming the upcast soil into a bank alongside it. This practice has meant that the name may be given to either the excavation or the bank. Thus
Offa's Dyke is a combined structure and
Car Dyke is a trench though it once had raised banks as well. In the midlands and north of England, a dike is what a ditch is in the south, a property boundary marker or small drainage channel. Where it carries a stream, it may be called a running dike as in
Rippingale Running Dike, which leads water from the
catchwater drain, Car Dyke, to the South Forty Foot Drain in
Lincolnshire (TF1427). The Weir Dike is a
soak dike in
Bourne North Fen, near
Twenty and alongside the
River Glen.
Dikes are very common on the flatlands bordering the
Bay of Fundy in
New Brunswick and
Nova Scotia Canada. The
Acadians who settled the area can be credited with construction of most of the dikes in the area, created for the purpose of farming the fertile tidal flatlands. These dikes are referred to as "aboiteau".
A dike made from stones laid in horizontal rows with a bed of thin turf between each of them is known as a
spetchel.
Dike can also mean a pond in the same way as Australians use the word
dam. However, this is more likely in the several other languages which use obviously related words. Frisian is one of them. The
Frisians who settled in England with the Angles and Saxons form a linguistic link with Dutch dating from well before the 12th century. See the stories of Saints
Boniface and
Wulfram.
In April 2006,
South Korea completed the
Saemangeum Seawall, displacing the
Afsluitdijk as the longest man-made dike in the world.
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