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Description
A picture which I submitted two days ago was called by me "a ditch in spring": [link]

Several of you protested that this was not a "ditch" from their point of view, but either a river or a canal, being far too large/broad for a ditch.

As to the river, there is a quick answer. A river is a natural and streaming bit of watercourse. We have rivers here, too, but the watercourse on my shot was not one of them. Neither is the one you see on this picture.

In this case I would also speak of a ditch, a broad one in this case. I wonder what my fellow-photographers from the Netherlands and Belgium think about this, as they live in the same sort of landscape?

But to tell the truth: the watercourse on this picture is a canal. Or rather it is the relic of an attempt to build a canal.

It is thus a canal that never was! But it still is called a canal. The "Tienhovens Kanaal" (the Canal of Tienhoven) was intended to connect the River Vecht with Hilversum and the area north of it.

In order to get as far as that it was necessary to cross a sand ridge of several miles, created during the last ice age but one as an end moraine and at this place still up to 10 metres higher than the surrounding flatlands.

Whether it was lack of money or the impossibility to keep up the water level in that sandy stretch, the canal was given up after about 200 yards in that sandy area (there are now the woods in the background).

So this unused bit of a canal that was never finished now remains a most peaceful relic of a late-18th or early-19th-century endeavour that proved a failure, but certainly is a success in today´s landscape.

There was an older version of this picture put into scraps, but the discussion about the "ditch-or-canal" question has made me rejuvenate it.

Description
A picture which I submitted two days ago was called by me "a ditch in spring": [link]

Several of you protested that this was not a "ditch" from their point of view, but either a river or a canal, being far too large/broad for a ditch.

As to the river, there is a quick answer. A river is a natural and streaming bit of watercourse. We have rivers here, too, but the watercourse on my shot was not one of them. Neither is the one you see on this picture.

In this case I would also speak of a ditch, a broad one in this case. I wonder what my fellow-photographers from the Netherlands and Belgium think about this, as they live in the same sort of landscape?

But to tell the truth: the watercourse on this picture is a canal. Or rather it is the relic of an attempt to build a canal.

It is thus a canal that never was! But it still is called a canal. The "Tienhovens Kanaal" (the Canal of Tienhoven) was intended to connect the River Vecht with Hilversum and the area north of it.

In order to get as far as that it was necessary to cross a sand ridge of several miles, created during the last ice age but one as an end moraine and at this place still up to 10 metres higher than the surrounding flatlands.

Whether it was lack of money or the impossibility to keep up the water level in that sandy stretch, the canal was given up after about 200 yards in that sandy area (there are now the woods in the background).

So this unused bit of a canal that was never finished now remains a most peaceful relic of a late-18th or early-19th-century endeavour that proved a failure, but certainly is a success in today´s landscape.

There was an older version of this picture put into scraps, but the discussion about the "ditch-or-canal" question has made me rejuvenate it.