Page 272 - Changing Living Spaces

Aleksander Panjek and Gregor Kovačič

but was stored in reservoirs throughout the year and was therefore clean-
er. It was available for irrigation or watering the gardens (e.g. the canal),
for watering the livestock and probably also for human consumption. So
we are witnessing a very interesting case of adaptation of the karst envi-
ronment through water regulation and the acquisition of new cultivat-
ed land, maintaining and improving the availability and quality of water.
As the maps of the Franciscean Cadastre show, the seventeenth-centu-
ry built elements just described were only partially in use in the first dec-
ades of the nineteenth century, especially at the higher northwestern end
of the doline; the canal that conducted water into the new, smaller arti-
ficial lake had apparently dried up, and the lake itself had shrunk to the
size of an ordinary karstic pond. The cadastre provides us with a few oth-
er insights and conclusions. By 1820, the dried-up bottom canal had lost
its function to the extent that the last section of its bed, which no longer
steered the water into the small artificial lake, was converted into farm-
land. Three parcels of land can be seen there – one with a field, one with
a meadow and one covered with a coppice of deciduous trees. The lands
at the mouth of the (now former) canal were mostly meadows; fields can
be seen only at the edge of this lowest part of the doline. It can be as-
sumed that the water infrastructure at this end had decayed, the walls
were breached, and the torrent began to flow out of the gully onto the
land again, making cultivation impossible.
By combining the cartographic and written parts of the cadastre, we
have tried to determine as accurately as possible the extent and actual
location of the area we are talking about. For this purpose, based on the
maps, we made a list of the plots located at the bottom of the doline. After
comparing LiDAr surface images and photographs with field observa-
tions, we removed from the list any plots that were on the slope surround-
ing the doline, which were often crop terraces or woodlots. We did this
because we felt that these plots were not part of the area of the old 1608
flood lake and drainage. In this way, we arrived at a total area of 8.1 ha,
which should correspond to the largest former floodplain in the doline.
The draining of the lake resulted in a somewhat smaller area, since part of
the area was occupied by water infrastructure: the upper canal with a res-
ervoir that continues into a smaller canal towards the centre of the doline;
a new small artificial lake – later a karstic pond with a meadow around it,
which was probably part of the lake in the past; and the area of the lower
canal that roughly overlaps with three plots of land that were on the same
line at the time of the Franciscean Cadastre. This water regulation infra-

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