Page 267 - Changing Living Spaces

The Neverlake: Water and Land Management in a Dry and Soilless Place

Today, or let’s say for the past twenty years, the ‘Lake’ is becoming
an increasingly overgrown ‘cultural’ landscape. It’s surrounded by
a forest; shrubbery is penetrating the built terraces; meadows can
still be seen at the bottom. Once or twice a year, larger machinery
is used to mow and transport the grass to an unknown farm – all
in a single day.
There are no more cattle in Štanjel. There are no people in the ‘Lake’
during the day; perhaps at night, a hunter or two is on the look-
out for game. The deer, roe deer or wild boars are its new masters.
People treat nature like plunderers. The first pines were felled on
Vrhec. It’s only a matter of time before the forest overgrows the
‘Lake’.
One more thing! The dolines Jezero (Lake) and Stočajnik contain
something I’ve never come across before in any description of the
Karst. According to the stories of ancestors, the dry stone walls
were there to reduce the force of torrents and prevent rocks from
being deposited on fields. However, they did allow soil to be depos-
ited on the flooded bottom of the valley. Water-induced soil erosion
on the barren Karst was a major problem once. I want to show these
systems for defence against water damage before I forget them, but
there’s no one to show them to. (Jožef Švagelj, email message to au-
thor, 1 Februar 2016)
As mentioned above, this appeal aroused our interest in the drained
‘small lake’ of Štanjel, which led to student research and finally to the
present scientific article, in which we try to sketch in an interdisciplinary
way the four-hundred-year-old relationship between humans and envi-
ronment in this incredibly interesting patch of the Classical Karst.

Water Regulation System and its Results: Water and Soil
This interpretive section of this chapter draws on geographic knowledge,
historical and oral sources, and the results of a detailed analysis of the
LiDAr image of the ‘Neverlake’ area. The information obtained is synthe-
sized into a coherent reconstruction of the construction activities associ-
ated with draining the lake, the initial reasons and results, and the sub-
sequent changes over time. The northwestern, i.e. largest, erosion gully
that opened into the Jezero doline was regulated in the lower part by en-
closing its left side with an embankment made of gravel; on its right side,
a dry stone wall was built, creating a canal for the running water (fig-

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