Does anyone still believe in water divining, or has it gone the way of spoon bending?
I can’t let Alison Mouser’s views on water divining (N&Q, 9 September)go unchallenged. Any evidence supporting this supposed phenomenon is dubious in the extreme. The observed effects are easily explained through well understood processes such as confirmation bias combined with the ideomotor effect (involving unconscious movements). There is no mysterious power to be discovered – mystical or otherwise. Gareth Williams, Liverpool Water divining is very much alive and can be depended on for such things as mapping redundant land-drain systems in farmland, tracking underground water sources and rediscovering long abandoned wells. It is also useful in most locational problems – ie, finding old buried foundations, networks of redundant pipework and mineral deposits, all of which are valued traditional skills handed down from medieval times, when the need for water, coal and ironstone was paramount. Today’s dowsers have received their skills from many sources and practise a combination of rec
