"Barrow Pit." Western American Term for Ditch

I'm from the American West and have heard a term local (northern Utah, southern Idaho, western Wyoming) rural farmers and ranchers use regularly with a half-dozen variations when they refer to ditches, usually deep ditches running designed to collect and transport run-off from snow or rain running alongside two-lane public highways. The term that is "barrow pit," and the first term may be pronounced "barrow" with the "a" taking an "eh" or "ah" sound, "burrow," "bar" (probably with an assumed apostrophe at the end as a shortener), or "burr."

Typical uses: "I ran my tractor into the barrow pit swatting at a bee." "That car ended up in the bar' pit."

I asked locals the origins of the term and have typically received shrugs or exasperated "that just what it's called"-type responses. I've sought other web resources, but have come up short.

The term barrow pit may derive from barrow-ditch or barrow-dick, cited in Joseph Wright, English Dialect Dictionary (1898):

BARROW-DITCH, sb. Obs. Ken[t]. Also written -dick. A small ditch.

Ken[t]. In the beginning of this century [the 1800s], before the roads were macadamized, step-faggots were placed on one side of the road to form a footpath, and a barrow-ditch extended from and at right angles to the footpath into the road. These occurred at regular intervals, draining the surface water from the road, and also compelling carts, &c., to keep off the footpath (P.M.); Paid W. Masters for making 76 rods of Barrow ditch att three halfpence a rod, 09*s*. 06*d*., Warehorne Highway Bk. (Dec. 26, 1752).

Hence Barrow-ditching, vbl. sb. making a barrow-ditch.

Ken[t]. Paid James Ifield for 62 Rods barrow Dicking, 10*s*. 4*d*., Orlestone Highway Bk. (Nov. 28, 1784).

Today, however, barrow pit is evidently primarily a Western U.S. and Western Canadian variant of borrow pit, which itself is attested in that form as far back as 1893 (in a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary to a use of the term by Rudyard Kipling) and back to 1864 in the form borrowing pit in writings by a Canadian railway engineer. Even older is this instance by a Canadian railway foreman named Thomas McKenzie in 1854:

The embankment No. 3 was made from borrowings at each end of the line, of stone and earth. ... I looked after the work.

The "borrowing" seems to take the form of excavating soil and or rock from the borrow pit and then laying it as a foundation or road bed for the highway or railroad track (as the case may be).

The McKenzie quotations appear in a detailed look at the terms barrow pit and borrow pit in Walter Avis, "Notes on Borrow(ing) Pit," in Language and Cognition: Essays in Honor of Arthur J. Bronstein (1984). Regrettably, only the first six pages of the eight-page essay are reproduced in the Google Books preview, so we don't get to read Avis's conclusions about his research. Still, he is skeptical about the folk etymological explanations given for each variant:

These inquiries [into barrow pit and borrow pit] and others indicated that the terms were familiar to civil engineers, who favored borrow pit (to them a technical term) and to nonurban Westerners, who knew both variants, some using one and some the other. This unsettled usage was made evident in a conversation I had in 1963 with two middle-aged men from Vanguard, Saskatchewan, lifelong friends and, indeed, traveling together when they visited me in Calgary [Alberta]. One had always used borrow pit and the other barrow pit, and each was surprised that the other used a different term.

Furthermore, each of these prairie farmers had an explanation for his usage, the first saying that the fill removed from the pit was 'borrowed,' the second that it was, in earlier days, 'wheeled from the pit in barrows.' I might add that the man who said the earth was borrowed was puzzled by the term because there was "no intention of paying it back." Clearly, neither had any idea of the term's origin, and, equally clearly, at least one of the explanations was a popular etymology.

Later Avis hints that barrow/borrow might be a corruption of burrow (as in the verb for tunneling) or that it might be related to the bar to passage that pit presents to wheeled traffic. But he doesn't completely discount the two farmers' etymological speculations either.

Robert Bates & Julia Jackson, Glossary of Geology (1987) has these entries for barrow pit, borrow and borrow pit:

barrow pit A term used locally in the US. for a borrow pit; more frequently used elsewhere for a ditch or excavation near a road or other ...

borrow Earth material (sand, gravel, etc.) taken from one location (such as a borrow pit) to be used for fill at another location; e.g., embankment material obtained from a pit when sufficient excavated material is not available nearby to form the embankment. The borrow material usually has suitable or desirable physical properties for its intended purpose.

borrow pit An excavated area where borrow has been obtained.

These definitions indicate that, in professional geological use, barrow pit and borrow pit do not refer to the same thing.

Allan Metcalf, How We Talk: American Regional English Today (2000) offers this way of distinguishing between two kinds of borrow pits:

In the Mountain West [of the United States], if you "borrow" dirt from the side of a road to create a drainage ditch, you've made a borrow pit. Originally it was called a barrow pit, because of the barrow or mound that is created when the ditch i dug. But few people nowadays have heard of a barrow, and everyone knows"borrow" so borrow pit it became.

Outside of the mountains, borrow pit has a different meaning: a pit from which dirt or gravel has been dug for use elsewhere. This kind of borrow pit has been a concern for environmentalists. For example, when one contractor proposed to remove topsoil for fill elsewhere, a county council member worried that the resultant "borrow pit" could become a landfill or dump.

I get the impression that Metcalf was unaware of Avis's investigative article from 16 years earlier.

Conclusions

The etymological origins of the term barrow pit (or borrow pit) are obscured by competing variant spellings, conflicting folk etymologies, and inconsistent definitions of the term. Walter Avis's 1984 inquiry into the term is well worth reading, but it doesn't yield any definitive answers—at least in the first three-quarters of its eight pages. Other explanations are even less persuasive, owing to their skimpier research.

I was born and raised in southwestern Idaho and the lower area along side any road is always referred to, at least by natives, as a "Borrow Pit" --you borrow material from the location to build up the roadbed. If a person calls it anything else you know they aren't native. ALso, non natives pronounce Boise, "Boi zee." natives pronounce it, "Boy see."