With your feet in the mud

There you are, standing with your bare feet in the cold, sucking mud again. Meanwhile, you're digging a canal, all day long. It's hard work. And your reward? A few Dutch guilders and a few measures of Dutch gin.

That’s what the life of a canal digger in Drenthe was like around 1850. The Bourtange Moor was the only place in the Netherlands where part of the peat had not yet been dug off. The peat-extraction companies had big plans for the area. First, the peat fields had to be made accessible. For this purpose an extension of the Hoogeveen Canal was dug – by hand, mind you! The ground workers removed the top layer of soil with wheelbarrows (1). The bottom layer was dug up with a special type of spade (2).  

Next, peat workers dug shallow and deeper trenches to gradually drain the area. This process could take up to as many as ten years. When enough water had been drained off, the trenches were further deepened into side channels, to give access to the peat-digging plots. The digging operations of these canals started at the end of June, when the peat cutting season was over. From then on, for the labourers it was nothing but plodding through the mud, barefoot, day after day, until the frost set in.