the.com/swimming hole
Nature's pool, minus the chlorine, lifeguard, and liability insurance.
means A natural pool deep and sheltered enough to swim in — a bend in a river, a quarry, or a pond spot locals know and love.
from Straightforward compound English: 'swimming' plus 'hole,' the old sense of 'hole' meaning a deep pit or pool of water (as in a 'watering hole'). The phrase is American in flavor, rising with 19th-century rural life — the swimming hole became a fixture of small-town and farm-country childhood, immortalized in folksy writing and art as the barefoot-boys-and-rope-swing icon of summer.
- legal status
- often trespassing, rarely enforced
- water source
- usually a dammed creek or quarry
- peak danger
- submerged rocks nobody mapped
- social rule
- rope swing etiquette is unwritten but sacred