I READ with interest your article about Scottish Water using dowsing to locate sources of water, though describing it as witchcraft seems a bit far-fetched (Scottish Water uses magic and witchcraft to leaks, The National, November 22).
I have had personal experience of this process and, as a confirmed sceptic and rationalist, it was a rather disturbing occurrence. In New Zealand, where many rural homes are remote and have no mains connections, dowsing for water is commonplace to find the right spot to drill your well for a domestic water supply.
While visiting the home of a well-known scientist, he mentioned that he had just employed one of the numerous professional dowsers who ply their trade in rural areas.
When I expressed my doubts my host silently left the room and returned with an ordinary wire coat hanger, which he proceeded to cut with pliers to produce the traditional y-shape. Handing it to me he invited me to stroll around the house, saying that it might not work for me but to hold the wire loosely in both hands and see what happened.
Nothing happened in most of the house but when I entered the kitchen area I was startled to feel the wire twist and kick up quite violently in my hands. To say I was astonished is putting it mildly as I was definitely a sceptic.
My host was greatly entertained and said I had just crossed over the cold water pipes bringing water from his new well!
His explanation was that moving water creates an electromagnetic field around it. I knew from my studies that all living organisms are surrounded by their own weak electromagnetic field. In some individuals it seems this is strong enough to create movement when the two fields interact.
That was a rational explanation for what for me had been a disturbing and unexpected experience. But witchcraft it most certainly was not!
Peter Craigie
Edinburgh
DON’T knock the dowsers. About three decades ago while I was living in Morayshire a dowser from Aberdeenshire was employed by a local farmer to find water for crop irrigation and to supply remote cattle troughs. In conversation, the dowser confided there were two major flows – he quoted depth and flow rates – that coincided under the middle of our house. An ideal location perhaps, but no way was I granting permission!
Fortunately, he also identified other sources and when these were test bored his estimates of depth and flow rate were proved accurate.
His equipment comprised two L-shaped pieces of fencing wire, much as in the illustration in Andrew Learmonth’s article, but held free to rotate in short lengths of copper pipe.
He gave me some instruction and I did sense “something” in the appropriate places. It was a weird feeling because I could not believe it. Magic indeed.
Later, when the topic cropped up in conversation, an elderly local said that before the war there had been a croft cottage on the site of our house. There was no running water in those days but they had a well that he estimated would be somewhere under our front porch!
Years later I was recounting this to a farmer in Argyllshire. He was sceptical but said he’d be delighted if I could find him a water supply for a distant part of the farm. He had a laugh when he saw my results. I had marked the lines of his field drains.
In Caithness, a burst water main was washing our drive away and four water board engineers with various devices like metal detectors and Geiger counters failed to find the stopcock.
A neighbour using a Y-shaped wooden twig pinpointed it in minutes. I’m absolutely convinced dowsing is for real.
Murray Dunan
Auchterarder
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