DYDLER/dɪdlə/

A clearer of water channels in the Norfolk broads.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has bought a remote fen in the Norfolk Broads, so isolated that few people have ever been there. As the Guardian reported in January 2007, “A few wild-fowlers would have visited it by boat when it was owned by Lord Percy; a handful of marsh men and sedge cutters still go there occasionally to harvest reeds; ditch ‘dydlers’ are sometimes sent in to keep the water channels open from vegetation, and a few naturalists and artists know about this lost world of swamp and sky.”

Dydler is local to the Broads; it comes from the implement that the worker uses, a dydle, either a sharp triangular spade or a metal scoop or dredge fixed to the end of a long pole. (The first part is said to rhyme with died.) To dydle is to clean out the bed of a river or ditch. The Oxford English Dictionary (which spells dydler with an i instead of a y — the latter spelling may be a mock archaism) guesses it is a cut-down version of dike-delve, but nobody really knows.

Walter White wrote a description of the dydler in his book Eastern England in 1865: “Standing on the bank with a scoop or dredge fixed to the end of a long pole, he plunges it into the stream; ... then he drags up the scoop by a bodily effort, and drops the muddy contents upon the bank.”

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