It's a kind of magic

Widely thought to be a form of witchcraft, water divining relies on a pair of rods and ‘the uncanny reaction of the human nervous system’ to factors unknown. Yet it is still employed by water companies today, discovers Catriona Gray

- Catriona Gray

WATER divining is one of those things that sounds utterly improbable until you see it for yourself. For me, it happened last summer. Workmen were digging trenches in our garden and we were all worried about the digger hitting the water pipe, the location of which had always been unknown. To our surprise, the very pragmatic engineer whipped out a set of divining rods and had not merely located but had also mapped the course of the pipe in less than a minute. Still skeptical, we tentatively dug where he suggested and, sure enough, the spade soon struck metal. There was the 100-year-old water pipe, following a course that defied all logical predictions, but that had somehow been found, using only a pair of bent copper rods.

The art of divining, also known as dowsing, goes back millennia and seems to have sprung up independently in several different countries. Prehistoric cave drawings in Spain, Algeria, and Iraq depict figures clutching a forked twig, engaged in the act of divining. Confucius wrote about it and the ancient Egyptians practiced it: divining tools were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and Cleopatra allegedly employed dowsers to search for gold.

The Christian Church appeared to have a complicated relationship with dowsing— there are plenty of accounts of monks using it, but it was eventually concluded to be on the side of sorcery and was denounced accordingly. Yet, it continued to be used. Elizabeth I brought German miners over to England to teach British miners how to divine for ore deposits and many notable thinkers and scientists were dowsers, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein. By the early 20th century, it was practiced widely but remained a slightly dubious art.