Re your article “Water firms admit they still use ‘medieval’ dowsing rods” (22 November): in the 1950s, our family lived on a farm in an isolated part of northern Somerset. The farmer submitted an application for planning permission to build two new houses in a field, including details of water supply and drainage (there were no mains services at all). He had already walked over the field with his L-shaped birch twig, and we watched as the point of the L creaked downwards in his hands as he walked over a spot he had marked on the ground. A man from the water board arrived and looked at the site with geological maps. After half an hour he said “it’s anyone’s guess”, went back to his van and brought back his own birch twig. When he walked across the mark, the point of the L creaked upwards in his hands. He said that was the right place to dig a well, which the farmer and my father dug, and it never dried up.
I believe that when dowsers were tested many years ago, they were taken to a field under which was an underground reservoir. None of them located water. The farmer in Somerset told us that his own technique of dowsing only locates running water, so the reservoir would not have been indicated by this method.
Many years later I was the architect for a restoration of a large building in south London. We arranged for a dowser to meet us at the building to try to locate pipes underground. He had a different kind of dowsing instrument. He discovered a whole system of water pipes which we think were originally for fire hydrants, gas pipes and underground drains, all made of iron, which we had no idea were there. When we asked for his invoice, he said that his organisation never charged fees, but that we could make a donation to the British Society of Dowsers.
John Dickinson
Architect, London
As a somewhat hippyish young man I was taught to dowse in the early 1980s by a very straight-laced Tory quantity surveyor, who carried dowsing rods in the back of his car as an aid to locating errant utility pipes and cables on building sites. A few years later I met a National Grid engineer, who also used dowsing to find lost underground cables. Both these men worked in environments where the success or failure of dowsing would be quickly apparent to their colleagues, and repeated failures would be unceremoniously mocked. If you tell a bunch of builders to dig a hole to find a pipe and it’s not there you may be forgiven once, but twice is pushing it.
These men dowsed because it worked. They didn’t know why or how, but knew that it worked, and how to do it. This is a key difference between science and technology – technologists cheerfully do all kinds of things that they don’t understand scientifically, because they work. Surely the correct scientific response is to ask why, if there’s no sense in dowsing, people continue to do it when their failures are so obvious.
Richard Ellam
Bristol
I have never fully understood the almost visceral hatred people of a certain level of disconnection have with those who choose to use methods that work, but which may have – as yet – no scientific basis. The water companies use dowsers. They have done so for a long time. These are not stupid or flaky people, they are professional, engaged in providing a service for profit. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t use them. Perhaps the nay-sayers would like to spend a week with a professional dowser and then see if they change their minds. Otherwise, we are just perpetuating the same kinds of hysteria that accompanied witch burnings.
Manda Scott
Clunbury, Shropshire
I have a pair of divining rods. My granddaughter was delighted when they formed a cross when being held over the toilet bowl. Could the scientists tell me why they do this?
Ann Newell
Thame, Oxfordshire
Of course water divining works. Have you not read Pigeon Post by Arthur Ransome? Try it yourself by cutting a wire coat hanger into two, discarding the hook, and holding the short lengths lightly in you hands, long lengths out straight, as you walk towards a water source.
Jill Moss
Chester
The words “witchcraft” and “superstition” in Matthew Weaver’s article “Divining intervention – water firms’ rod reversal” (23 November) have no place in a newspaper respected for truthfulness. That and Simon Usborne’s ridiculous dismissal of dowsing (Divination: The industries relying on magic and superstition, G2, 23 November) might just have been worth publishing were it not for three inconveniently significant facts: it works, it is replicable and it is independently verifiable. I was taught to dowse as an engineering undergraduate by my tutor, a world authority at the time on the chemistry of clays. He had been commissioned by the government in the 1960s to survey the island of (then) Ceylon for graphite deposits. He found that dowsing was a far more reliable, quick and cost-effective method than any geophysical technique then available because of the irregular nature of the underground deposits. I have used it successfully to survey underground water courses and drains where digging up the ground was not an option. Dowsing is in the same category as gravity and quantum mechanics in that science cannot explain how it works, but that it works is irrefutable.
Rev Martin J Smith
Wilmslow, Cheshire
As a first-class honours graduate in civil engineering, I was very sceptical when starting my site experience on the M61 motorway in 1968, to be told I would be taught water divining. I was to use this skill to find existing drains that needed to be strengthened or diverted. I had heard of water divining but thought this was an activity at best restricted to a few people with a “divine” gift. My senior engineer simply asked for two welding rods from the site store, bent them and showed me how to hold them. He then threw a coin on to the floor and asked me to walk over it, to demonstrate how the rods would cross when I walked above the coin, as they duly did.
I proceeded to use these bent welding rods to divine drains on the line of the motorway and access roads, locating them for subsequent site excavation and inspection by knocking in pegs where the welding rods crossed. On one summer night, I left work after showing a “ganger”, who would be managing the backhoe diggers in the morning, a neat row of pegs across a sizeable field. I arrived the next morning to find that he had dug a trench by hand exposing the drain across the whole field, in order to install a stronger drain construction. To me that feat seemed really superhuman, albeit by a former “navvy” that had simply enjoyed the exercise!
Roland Hill
Stockport, Greater Manchester
In response to Philip Ball’s article (Water divining is bunk (22 November), in the mid-1970s my parents built a house in county Clare and employed a diviner to find water. He held a forked stick and walked across the field until it twitched indicating a source. My father tried it out and the twig also twitched. The diviner said: “I hope you won’t put me out of business” but my Dad, Brian Farrell, assured him that it was unlikely to happen. At the time he was a political broadcaster and senior lecturer in politics in University College Dublin – many would agree an intelligent and educated man but also a water diviner.
Water divining goes back further than the 16th century, when Ball claims it first appeared. In the fifth and sixth centuries, diviners were used to find water sources in developing urban areas (Vitruvius, On Architecture 8.1, Pliny Natural History 31.43 – 49). Cassiodorus, a Roman statesman from that time (Letters 3.53.1 and 6) wrote “a water diviner has come to Rome from Africa where that art is cultivated … on account of the region’s aridity … although the city of Rome has a bountiful supply of running water … one might find many localities … which have need of this man’s skill.”
I would argue with Ball that water divining is neither medieval witchcraft nor a deluded art. It is a skill and still necessary in today’s modern world. There may be frauds out there but I’m sure that established water companies are no fools. It is extraordinary that these old methods work, so why stop them?
Miriam Farrell Shtaierman
Pardesia, Israel
Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com