Return-Path: Eric.Madelaine@sophia.inria.fr
Received: by crios.inria.fr (8.6.12/8.6.12) id IAA12195; Fri, 17 Nov 1995 08:53:40 +0100
Message-Id: <199511170753.IAA12195@crios.inria.fr>
To: madelain@crios.inria.fr
cc: madelain@crios.inria.fr
Subject: dowsing in Ireland
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 1995 08:53:40 +0100
From: Eric Madelaine 


Topic Number: 12

From: Adrian Thomas * 
To: "'cd new nov 95'" 
Subject: Dowsing for wells.
Date: Thu, 16 Nov 95 11:00:00 GMT

Now that the hysteria about dowsing has sied down and the Satanic 
Implicication been well washed out, I'd like to tell you about a man I used 
to work with in Oxfordshire England.  I had only just graduated and moved to 
work in an old family business which both manufactured and distributed farm 
equipment.  The Company had been around for hundreds of years and had 
traditionally serviced the mechanisation aspects of farming.  In the late 
19th Century they had teams of Well Borers and Corn Threshers who travelled 
the surrounding Counties in a sort of travelling roadshow !

My colleague, Don, was at reaching retirement at the age of 65 in about 1979 
and was, at that time, Company Secretary ( like Finance Director ) and no 
fool by anybody's standards.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, Don had 
started out his career with the company as a boy and worked with the Well 
Drilling team as a trainee.  It very soon became apparent that he had a 
tallent and was "adopted" by the team Foreman who was responsible for 
getting the work and choosing the locations.

In those days ( say 1920 ), a farmer who wanted water offered the contract 
to a number of drilling teams from different companies.  Each sent along a 
"surveyer" who looked around the farm to assess the site potential and work 
out a price.  The standard method of surveying the site varied but many 
companies used surveyers who were dowsers, not geologists - many had no 
qualifications and couldn't even write !  The important thing about this is 
that the price was quoted on a footage basis and " NO WATER _ NO PAY ! ". 
 Thus a dowser went into a site and recconned up the best place and the 
depth to good water.  At, say, 1 shilling per foot the price would be worked 
out for the dowser's estimated depth.  Clearly the keenest quote the job but 
if the well went much deeper than expected or no water at all was found, the 
farmer paid nothing and the Well Boring Team were in big trouble !

There are many wells, some dug by hand and many hundreds of feet deep, some 
sunk by percusion machines driven off steam winches, all around the 
Oxfordshire and Berkshire countryside - all were located by dowsing !.  The 
well used by a famous Maltsters is still drawing water at many thousands of 
gallons a day from the well  located and drilled by my old friend, straight 
into an aquifer at the first attempt.  More recent wells nearby have yeilded 
nothing or very little !!

As a Chartered  Engineer I accept that the success of dowsing for water is 
hard to explain.  Don used to use a pendulum and explained to me that he 
could detect "waves" of power both over the water and at intervals either 
side of it.  Thus, as he walked across a field for the first time, he would 
pass a band of weak response and then into a calmer area, then a stronger 
band of response, then calmer, then finally the most energetic response over 
the water, then calm then moderate, then calm, then weaker etc.  In some 
sites the number of bands was greater and others less.  One needed to 
traverse the whole field a few times to be able to judge where the strongest 
"waves" were.  It seems that if he stood over the most powerful response 
area and held the pendulum still and vertical before releasing it, it would 
start to rotate slowly gathering speed and describing a conical shape.  He 
could apparently judge, from experience, how deep the water was based on 
these rotations and the spacing of the waves of power.

Don was a devout Christian, a regular church goer and as nice a man as you 
could ever hope to meet.  He never gave me any reason to beleive that he 
could utter a lie or deceive any person knowingly.  This is a nice guy in a 
suit not a witch doctor or shrink.  The Company was successful and won more 
contracts than most.  Sometimes they missed the water and usually beleived 
so implicitely in Don's abilities that they would re-dowse and try again a 
few feet to one side of the first shot.  Usually this second attempt was 
successful.  Looking back, this was possibly due to the drill deviating 
stlightly as went through the strata - a common problem wioth percusion 
drilling.

There you go - take it leave it.

I used to know a guy who could charm away warts - but that's another story.

Adrian.Thomas@UL.IE   ( Ireland )