Doodlebugging

According to St Wiki, as a so-called ‘Ideomotor Response’, “dowsing is a pseudoscience and there is no scientific evidence no that it is any more effective than random chance”. Well first-off who ever wrote that clearly hasn’t watched Russell Crowe in the excellent Water Diviner film, or indeed ever met my erstwhile colleague on site today - Peter the structural engineer come water diviner.

Peter may not have found a spring of sweet running water, but he certainly found the undefined route of a buried combined surface water and foul drain that I couldn’t locate in Sale, Manchester.

Like many dowsers today, Peter uses a pair of so-called ‘L-Rods’ - essentially two bent coat hangers. One rod is held in each hand, with the short arm of the L held upright and the long arm pointing forward. When something is "found", the rods cross over one another (as they did consistently today).

I had a go but nothing happened. “You have to be the seventh son of a seventh son” explained Peter.