Page 270 - Changing Living Spaces

Aleksander Panjek and Gregor Kovačič

purposes. The canal runs through the middle of the alluvial fan (figure
5). Geomorphologically, by constructing the barrier, people have to some
extent fossilized the existing alluvial fan that extends from the north-
western part of the doline towards its bottom and that was still active in
earlier centuries. On the map in the Franciscean Cadastre the transverse
barrier is shown as a body of water because the water was retained behind
the embankment; when there was no water, the land was soggy (figure 6).
Also interesting is the regulation of the torrent that flows from the area
‘Nad Jezerom’ (‘Above the Lake’) into the doline. Here, too, the lower part
of the erosion gully from the lower, downstream side was enclosed with
a dry stone wall to a distance of about 160 m to prevent the water from
overflowing and depositing sediments on the bottom of the doline. With
the help of the dry stone wall along the riverbed, a kind of artificial levee
was created, which diverted the water from the erosion gully to another
reservoir, probably created in the smaller area still called ‘Jezero’ (‘Lake’);
the Franciscean Cadastre shows only one body of water in this area, name-
ly a karstic pond without an inlet (unlike the northwestern part of the val-
ley). The downstream bank of the lake was also artificially raised to pre-
vent the water from overflowing into the lowest part of the doline where a
ponor is still located today. The reconstruction of all the above-mentioned
works is shown in figure 8 as a comprehensive regulatory system.
In this way, instead of flooding a larger area, the water was directed and
dammed in a much smaller area. The area has kept the name ‘Lake’ un-
til today, in memory of its predecessor. The older lake was probably much
larger and occasionally flooded a larger section of the doline because it
was fed by two torrents at two different ends of the doline. If this had not
been the case, the use of the term ‘drainage’ in the seventeenth-centu-
ry document would have made no sense; even less sense would have been
the construction work, the remains of which can still be seen in the field
four centuries later.
These construction works can be interpreted as the works to drain the
lake in 1608. Their purpose and results, based on the reconstruction men-
tioned above, have proven to be much more complex than simply drain-
ing the lake; due to its connection with torrential tributaries and the ex-
istence of a ponor at the bottom, the lake can reasonably be classified
as a seasonal flood lake. The issue was not just drainage, but regulation
and management of the water and land use. Considering that the original
land was occasionally flooded to varying degrees and for varying lengths
of time, was more or less marshy, and that the torrents deposited larg-

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