This is a personal account by another water diviner, Clive Beadon, who describes some general features of dowsing and his own technique for locating water. This account written a couple of decades on from the previous posts, incorporates some different features from those earlier methods, presumably incorporating newer ideas.
Like many dowsers, he took up dowsing, after observing a dowser at work and being encouraged to try it himself. He tells an amusing tail of dowsing from an aircraft, as a means of practice (there are a number of instances of this in the British Society of Dowsers’ journal).
He stresses the need to only apply one’s dowsing to particular specific areas. This is because the key to dowsing is the proper interpretation of the dowsing reactions. The dowser is constantly learning, and he found that his dowsing technique was constantly changing. The important factor is one’s “mental attitude”, should be “determination and certainty”, and one should be aware “Shibboleths”, that is attitudes and ways of working which only hamper interpretation. Instead use direct and simple questions, with cross checking where possible.
In the latter part of the article, he talks about his experiences water divining in the drier parts of Portugal.
His method of water divining differs from the previous posts. He starts with a map dowse using a pendulum. He then programs his mind to look for water no deeper than some pre-set depth. To provide some guarantee of a good water supply, he searches for streams crossing each other at different depths. Then for each stream, he deduces its depth and the different strata between it and the surface, since this will affect the ease or otherwise of the drilling. Then the rate of flow and water purity, with reference to trace elements, since customers might require this knowledge. The likely positions must be referenced to the actual geography, as shown on the map, to check for access to the site, and to establish that if a bore hole was sunk, that it does not rob a neighbour of their water supply.
Next, he goes on site with a whalebone dowsing rod (a springy type of rod) and he goes about double checking the results of the map dowsing. On site he surveys the strata below. He finds the crossing point if the two streams. Separately analysing each stream for depth and flow rate. For depthing he uses a purely mental approach, in which he counts down in feet from the surface until he gets a reaction. For flow rate, he stands over the stream and rotates himself through 360 degrees, until he gets a reaction, each rotation being so many gallons per hour. He has to correct depth estimates and flow estimates based on his analysis of the strata.
He uses a particularly interesting (and probably individualistic) method to determine whether there are any more flows, flowing into the crossing point. This involves inserting an iron rod over the stream reactions to cancel out the previous reactions. There is a similarity here to the Cryke depthing method described in the last post. It is as if the dowser can program their dowsing reactions through mental intent.
However, there are two confounding issues (dowsing traps) affecting his dowsing and other aspects of the search, a dry aquifer, or “Spook” and a “Shadow” (or imaginary image) of the real stream, or aquifer. But he describes techniques he uses to identify these.
He does not go into much detail about determining the purity of the water, but my guess is that he uses a “Mager colour wheel”, simply a card with a palette of differing colours around the circumference, then using each colour as a sample of the purity of the water, e.g. black might mean brackish water, and light blue might mean drinkable.
All in all, his technique is very thorough to avoid mistakes, which though potentially quite an exhausting process, is one which he found gave its just rewards.
The article is entitled “A splinter of sound”, available here: http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No162_1973_p290.pdf