A few years later I met a National Grid engineer, who also used dowsing to find lost underground cables. John Dickinson Architect, LondonĪs 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. 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. 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. He had a different kind of dowsing instrument. We arranged for a dowser to meet us at the building to try to locate pipes underground. Many years later I was the architect for a restoration of a large building in south London. 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. I believe that when dowsers were tested many years ago, they were taken to a field under which was an underground reservoir. He said that was the right place to dig a well, which the farmer and my father dug, and it never dried up. When he walked across the mark, the point of the L creaked upwards in his hands. After half an hour he said “it’s anyone’s guess”, went back to his van and brought back his own birch twig. A man from the water board arrived and looked at the site with geological maps. 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. 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). 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.
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