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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."

As a land surveyor in the American West (California & Washington), I've heard the term "borrow pit", used almost exclusively by civil engineers as a place to get fill (dirt, gravel, sand, etc.) locally on the construction site instead hauling it in by truck.

As far as the ditch alongside the road, unless it was the borrow pit during construction (quite possible, you have to do something with material you've excavated), it would almost certainly be called a swale on the plans instead.

Artificial swales are often designed to manage water runoff, filter pollutants, and increase rainwater infiltration.[2]

The farmers & ranchers in your area may still refer to them as borrow pits, but on the construction plans I'd be willing to bet they were called swales and were laid out as part of the road's cross section to channel water.

Grew up in western Nebraska, and we called it a bar pit. Makes sense that no matter how you spell it, it would have derived from a borrow pit because the ditches are next to roads made of the dirt borrowed from their spot.

I believe this is all loosy goosy analysis as most sources over the word barrow when applied to ditches and vehicles of carrying. Because similarity of sound of different words they usually migrate towards the context of use as do other words. But when they have similar sounds or spelling they get confused and merged in common usage. A good case has to do with the word "Travesty". This word simply means a joke, a mockery, a sham! There was in past times a penalty in baseball (most likely emanating from the Black Sox era of bought players and games or perhaps the goofy 'gas house gang' of the 30's era Cardinals. The penalty resulted if anyone attempted to make a mockery as Daffey and Dizzy Dean humorously sometimes did by clowning. If a person degraded the game by such acts they were subject to an umpire calling a 'travesty'. I checked as recent as 15 years ago with a recreational therapist, and sometimes umpire and he assured me it was still in the books. Now I have given over 1,000 I.Q. test and in the previous version of the Wechsler one of the last words in the Vocabulary section was the word Travesty. Now because of the sound (shades of the Onomatopoeia phenomenon?) and similarity of 'travesty' and 'tragedy' and often used together the tendency of words and their meaning to migrate to take on some of their meaning the context and 'atmosphere' of their usage, the meaning migrates. So often the phrase has occurred "It is a grave travesty of justice that senator Fog Horn, etc, etc, " that the result get confused with the word. i.e. a bad or 'tragic' result becomes the associated meaning of the word 'travesty'. I've had individuals with an I.Q. of 130 assume travesty meant some kind of tragedy. Now, case at hand. The Oxford dictionary and others will admit the most ancient use of the word barrow was an archeological term meaning a mound, there was a round barrow, a bowl barrow, a fancy barrow (one that differed, perhaps three mounds together) and so on. Now filled in archeological (check the Oxford Archaeological dictionary) are the use of ancient mounds in England made by prehistorical inhabitants of England who created these various barrows. Infact America is covered by them from the mounds yielding huge amounts of ancient clay pipes, bowls, etc. located here in Oklahoma and plundered in the 30's and sold for 50 cents etc they were so plentiful. The snake like mounds that were quite lang back in the Midwest of Ohio, etc. Repeatedly in distant times the barrows the archaeologists examined were created by digging ditches and carrying the dirt to the 'barrow' or mound they were building. The ditches were referred long before (100 years?) civil engineers late in 1800's referred to the area they got excavation material from as first barrow and then borrow pits. That can be checked and is acknowledge by folks assuming the latter that they and always been barrow pits. The barrow ditches around barrows were associated and the adjective use of the noun for which they were associated, the barrow, as frequently is used to for other nouns. Simply put. Howeever one can easily see the quick migration and mixing by workers of a barrow ditch where you got material for the barrow mound as in their minds and then in their usage being where they were borrowing the mateerial. This can be checked. Now most sources suggest there is NO connection between a wheel barrow and the barrow ditch. Good references will say that a barrow was a platform (small like a hod for mortar or dirt to be carried on. Then when they took it off their shoulder and realized instead of carrying like masons still do up on the platform with mortar they added a wheel and the 'mound' they carried i.e. the morter or dirt platform was given a wheel. I believe this is what happed and both words trace back to references of a barrow being used for mounds as far back as 1400. The rest is loosely derived by conjecture. I believe one can varify in sources references to the same of what I've proposed. I have seen references to such in civil engineering (I was one at one time) in long past England. Rf.