Soak dike

The term Soak dike is used in The Fens of eastern England to mean a ditch or drain running parallel with an embankment, for the purpose of taking any water that soaks through from the river or drain beyond the bank.

The leaky condition of the river embankments usually arose from a difficulty in finding good materials for their construction and from the piecemeal way in which the structures accumulated as the ground shrank or repairs were needed.

The difficulty is overcome by cutting a fairly small ditch, perhaps twenty or thirty metres from the bank, so that it collects the ground water and feeds it to a pump.

Counter drain is another term for much the same thing though in this case, it may have been designed also to deal with water overflowing the river bank.

[citation needed] The Counter Drain in Deeping Fen is a good example, where the land between it and the bank of the River Glen was designed as a wash.