legends · 4 min read ·
Dowsing
A dowser follows a line uphill and a bore drops into a cavern where someone drops stones back.
I have dowsed for water for thirty years, mostly for farms, sometimes for new houses. I use hazel twigs, cut green, held like the reins of a horse. I do not claim to know how it works. I know that the twig dips, and that when it dips, there is water, and that when I tell the driller to start at that spot, the water comes.
The call came in September from a woman called Mrs. Sutcliffe, who had bought a farmhouse above Kelder. The well was dry. The spring that had fed it for two hundred years had been blocked in some way. She wanted a new source.
· · ·
I walked the yard on a Tuesday morning, with the dew still on the grass. The twig stayed still for the first half hour. Then, near the old pigsty, it dipped, hard, so that the bark scraped my palms. I marked the spot with a peg. I walked a few yards on and the twig dipped again. Another peg. And a third. I stood and looked at my pegs. They made a line.
The line ran uphill. Water does not run uphill, and a vein of it does not usually run across the slope, as this one did, but I have seen odder. I followed it. The pegs went up the field, past the stone wall, into the rough ground where the bracken starts. At the top of the field I lost the twig. It swung loose in my hands, then twisted away from me and pointed back the way I'd come.
· · ·
I told Mrs. Sutcliffe the water was uphill and rose from the slope. She said: "That's what the man said before." I asked what man. She said the previous owner, who had also dug for water, and had also followed a line, and had also been told to dig at the top.
He died in the well, she said. Nobody found him for a week. It was fourteen feet down and dry.
I said I'd put a peg at the top of the field, where the twig was strongest, and that the driller could try.
· · ·
The driller started on the Thursday. A man called Hobbs, with a lorry rig, from Skipton. He put his bit into the ground at my peg and went down. At twenty feet he hit rock, and drilled through. At forty feet the drill went suddenly free, as if into a void. At sixty he stopped, to check, and the line went slack.
I was standing by the rig. Mr. Hobbs lowered a weighted tape into the bore. It paid out and out, past a hundred, past a hundred and fifty, and touched nothing. He said: "There's a cavern. A big one." He lowered a lamp on a cable. It swung into darkness. He said: "There's no bottom."
He dropped a stone.
· · ·
I counted. I always count, from habit. The stone left his hand and I started. One. Two. At eleven seconds I heard it. A faint, distant knock, as of stone on stone, a very long way down.
Mr. Hobbs said it was the deepest he had known.
Then he dropped a second stone. I counted again. At eleven seconds, the knock. And then, after a pause of about the same length, a third sound. Another knock. A second stone, from a thing that had not been dropped.
Mr. Hobbs and I looked at each other. He picked up a third stone. He dropped it. Eleven seconds. A knock. Eleven seconds more. A second knock, a little louder.
Someone at the bottom was dropping them back.
· · ·
The hydrogeologist, a young woman called Dr. Iqbal, came out the next week with a camera on a cable. She sat in the yard in her car and watched the screen. The bore went down, down. At a hundred and ninety metres the light caught a ledge, and on the ledge a little heap of stones, small and neat.
She recorded forty minutes of footage. She sent me her note.
*The camera reached the cavern floor at 212 m. The floor is flat. It is covered with a very large number of small stones, each placed carefully beside the others, in rings. The rings are concentric. At the centre of the rings is a bucket, galvanised, with a rope. The rope runs up. It goes up out of the frame, towards the bore, taut.*
*The bucket is full of water. It is clear and still.*
*Someone is holding the rope.*
· · ·
I told Mrs. Sutcliffe to cap the bore. I told her to put a concrete slab over it and a stone on the slab. I have not dowsed since. I keep my hazel twigs in a drawer.
But I drive past the farm sometimes. The stone is still on the slab. And last month, in the dusk, I saw that the rope had been tied to the ring of the slab, from underneath. It had come up through a crack in the concrete, thin and tight, hairline. It was swaying, very slightly, as though it was being drawn on gently from below, to see if anyone would pull back.