A wooden sluice or aboiteau (plural aboiteaux) is then built into the dyke, with a hinged door (clapper valve) that swings open at low tide to allow fresh water to drain from the farmland but swings shut at high tide to prevent salt water from inundating the fields.
The Black Sluice is the name given to the structure that controls the flow of the South Forty-Foot Drain into The Haven, at Boston, Lincolnshire, England.
The main drain in the Black Sluice District, extending from Boston Haven to Gutheram Cote (sc. modern Guthram Gowt).
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Located near Chatteris and Ramsey, the river runs 10.5 miles, from Wells Bridge, where it joins the Old River Nene, to Welches Dam Sluice, where it joins the Counter Wash Drain, which then changes identity into the Old Bedford River.
Mill ponds, weirs, sluice gates and an aqueduct are also part of the museum as well as a 19th-century working waterwheel, fulling stocks and other machinery associated with the finishing of woollen cloth, an original Arkwright water frame, and a Hargreaves Spinning Jenny.
The weir and sluice for the leat were replaced when the large pumping station for Rutland Water was built near the modern A1 bridge over the Welland.
It was said by Pishy Thompson in his History and Antiquities of Boston, that the name probably came from "Long Creek" as it was the largest and longest creek in the fen, where about a mile north of the present village of Langrick there was a sluice erected in 1543.
During the Battle of the Yser, part of the First Battle of Ypres in World War I, Hendrik Geeraert opened the sluice gates on the mouth of the river Yser twice to flood the lower lying land, thus halting the German advance.
The 1868 ordnance survey map identifies the site of this pre-conquest mill from the position of its sluice.
The main job of the Drain is to gather the waters pumped from the Kesteven Fens, the Holland Fens and the Weir Dyke, a soak dike in Bourne North Fen, alongside the Bourne Eau and River Glen, northwards and eastwards to the Black Sluice at Boston, where they are discharged to the tidal waters of The Haven.
During 2009 and 2010 work was undertaken to upgrade sluice gates, watercourses and culverts to enable seasonal flooding of Southlake Moor during the winter diverting water from the Sowy River onto the moor.