Dike (construction)
:
For other uses of dike or dyke (and combining forms) see Dyke.A
dike (or
dyke) is an artificial earthen wall, constructed as a defence or as a boundary. It is known in
American English as a
levee. 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. Where such an emergency bank is an addition to the topan existing one, it is known as a
cradge.
Dikes were first contructed in the
Indus Valley Civilization (in
Pakistan and
North India from circa
2600 BC) on which the agrarian life of the
Harappan peoples depended.
[http://history-world.org/indus_valley.htm The Indus Valley. Accessed June 11, 2006]The word dike is associated with the
Netherlands "dijk", where dikes were built as early as the 12th century but it was an
Anglo-Saxon word
dic hundreds of years before that and pronounced with a hard c in northern England and as
ditch in the south. 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.
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
Afsluitdijk as the longest man-made dike in the world.
*
Afsluitdijk*
Saemangeum Seawall*
Tantramar Marshes*
Flood Wall*
Seawall*
Richmond's Dyke system*
DeltaWorks.Org Flood protecting dams, dikes and barriers project in the Netherlands
*
Ordnance Survey Pathfinder 856 (1:25 000 Sheet TF12)
*Oxford English Dictionary ISBN 0-19-861212-5
