Living in a country where water is becoming an extremely scarce resource I have been privy to a few borehole projects where Dowsing was utilised to pinpoint the area where the best opportunity could be found to access a water source.
There may be an upswing in this skill when climate change results in a reduction of rainfall as we fail to reduce GHG emissions.
Many thanks for that, Robert - yes, very interesting, and good point about climate-change.
The point about skill was the real focus I was after in the post. I know the theory and methodology of dowsing, probably better than most: but like any other true skill, what dowsing needs more than anything else is consistent _practice_ over many years - and, uh, that's the bit I'm not so good at. The guy at my colleague's farm was amazing: he was like a radar-pulse, I could feel it straight away as he turned it on and off and just walked up to the place and rattled off the depth with no effort at all - but that was after sixty years of solid _practice_. My only real skill is in getting _other_ people to do it: and in that, yeah, I _do_ know what I'm doing: I got my colleague able to do it successfully in just a few minutes, finding a water-pipe and a power cable and able to distinguish between them.
The other important point about dowsing as a skill, as something to use in the 'Not-known'. In Britain, in the London basin, you don't need dowsers there because the geology is a set of curved layers that are so predictable that you calculate exactly what depth to drill anywhere and know you'll hit water there. But in the west, particularly in Somerset shire, the geology is a scrambled mess with water-flows in narrow veins with unpredictable courses and unpredictable depths - and that's where dowsing really comes to the fore.
(These days we do have good tech that's more reliable than dowsing for some purposes - for example, ground-penetrating radar is really good at finding cables and pipes at shallower depths. But tech can also be fiddly to work with, and _very_ expensive, so dowsing does still have its place. The catch, of course, is that it's a skill, and to develop that skill that takes time and effort and a willingness to face lots of mistakes - and those tend to be in short supply in these lazy days of 'let the tech do everything for us'....)
Living in a country where water is becoming an extremely scarce resource I have been privy to a few borehole projects where Dowsing was utilised to pinpoint the area where the best opportunity could be found to access a water source.
There may be an upswing in this skill when climate change results in a reduction of rainfall as we fail to reduce GHG emissions.
Many thanks for that, Robert - yes, very interesting, and good point about climate-change.
The point about skill was the real focus I was after in the post. I know the theory and methodology of dowsing, probably better than most: but like any other true skill, what dowsing needs more than anything else is consistent _practice_ over many years - and, uh, that's the bit I'm not so good at. The guy at my colleague's farm was amazing: he was like a radar-pulse, I could feel it straight away as he turned it on and off and just walked up to the place and rattled off the depth with no effort at all - but that was after sixty years of solid _practice_. My only real skill is in getting _other_ people to do it: and in that, yeah, I _do_ know what I'm doing: I got my colleague able to do it successfully in just a few minutes, finding a water-pipe and a power cable and able to distinguish between them.
The other important point about dowsing as a skill, as something to use in the 'Not-known'. In Britain, in the London basin, you don't need dowsers there because the geology is a set of curved layers that are so predictable that you calculate exactly what depth to drill anywhere and know you'll hit water there. But in the west, particularly in Somerset shire, the geology is a scrambled mess with water-flows in narrow veins with unpredictable courses and unpredictable depths - and that's where dowsing really comes to the fore.
(These days we do have good tech that's more reliable than dowsing for some purposes - for example, ground-penetrating radar is really good at finding cables and pipes at shallower depths. But tech can also be fiddly to work with, and _very_ expensive, so dowsing does still have its place. The catch, of course, is that it's a skill, and to develop that skill that takes time and effort and a willingness to face lots of mistakes - and those tend to be in short supply in these lazy days of 'let the tech do everything for us'....)