Talk:Moat

Untitled
"Moats in Other Parts of the World" mentions only the Mississippian culture. Someone familiar with East Asian military history should add something about Asian moats. At a minimum, there are moats in Japan (in the middle of Tokyo, no less), China (including in the middle of Beijing), and Thailand. -- Securiger 07:24, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Japan has moats out the wazoo. Someone, please feel free to read and organize some thoughts on that.
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_castle  theanphibian 03:57, 21 September 2006 (UTC)

moats rock my sox — Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.39.182.219 (talk • contribs) 17:08, 11 February 2007

Japan Moats
I just added the Japan part. It probably has holes all over it, so please edit me! But let me stress that I did not pull any of this out of nowhere. I noticed that the Japanese moat page had a completely independently developed page with basically information pertinent only to the Japanese moats. The entire part about the middle age moats not having water for instance, that's my best translation from the Japanese moat page. And the Japanese word for moat apparently does not require that there be water in it. I thought that was interesting.

I thought this was pretty vital actually. Japanese castles actually have moats on a scale way beyond other parts of the world. But as the Japanese_castle article points out, very few have ever actually sustained attack. I see it more as a part of the engineered Japanese city.

The pics I added are just repeats from other articles. I thought they added some good flavor. Particularly the imperial palace map, that's just CRAZY!

I noticed that other languages had articles developed fairly independently as well (the rest are obvious translations), but I've only studied Japanese, so I can't help there.

The entire "See Also" section, I basically copied from the Russian version btw. Please add on as your imagination hits you.

I'll leave the stub status for now, but I think we should reconsider arrangement and the stubness soon. theanphibian 03:41, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Flying Bridge
Flying bridge currently links to something about ships, I'm going to poke around for a few minutes and see if I can find something else to link it two, and if I don't find anything, I'll remove mention of it for now. --Talroth 01:41, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Filled with water
It is a myth that most castle moats were filled with water. Most were dry ditches. Water defences are fairly rare, depending as they do on a water source (castles tend to be on elevated sites), the lie of the land, solving the engineering problems and making it difficult for an attacker to just let the water out! Cyclopaedic (talk) 10:49, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Water defences
Added most of the material previously in the Water castle article, which now redirects here - I don't believe there is a common term "water castle" in English and it makes sense to deal with moats and other water defences in the same article. It is still unreferenced, so a lot of work is needed. Cyclopaedic (talk) 17:33, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
 * As a result of the move from Water castle we have a preponderance of images of castles with extensive water defences or set in lakes. We could do with some images of narrower moats to redress the balance, including some dry moats. Cyclopaedic (talk) 12:02, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
 * If a castle is built on an island in a lake (with a bridging link to the mainland), does the surrounding water count as a moat or is it simply an island in a lake? d a n n o  21:07, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Animals?
It's somewhat of a common trope in fiction to have moats filled with dangerous animals. I'm sure this would be far too impractical to have happened very often, if at all, in reality. Either way, it would be good to address this. Or is this completely fantasy? Does this sound like a request for information about dragons at Tower? --BDD (talk) 19:43, 14 May 2015 (UTC)


 * I often see crocodilians in fictional moats, but I think it's strictly fantasy (though there could be real cases of this in Asia or Africa). Aside from crocodiles, the only other dangerous animals you could house in a moat would be the bull shark and giant constrictor snakes like the reticulated python, since most moats are freshwater, but again I doubt there's ever been a real case of any.72.211.65.45 (talk) 21:13, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Fosse
The dab directs readers to this article but the page doesn't currently explain the term or its difference from 'moat'. — Llywelyn II   20:07, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

Citations needed
This article has multiple unreferenced paragraphs and many unsourced sentences at the end of paragraphs. This issue has to be addressed as this article is visited quite often by readers. Wretchskull (talk) 11:49, 8 February 2021 (UTC)