Seriously dodgy. Basically, because while dowsing works (albeit for some people but not others) it is almost impossible to know what the rod/s are telling you. As an example, I heard recently of a person who paid a local dowser to find water on their land. Instead, the rods indicated several locations, which when dug produced the following items: Three walls, one pipe trench (with live electricity cable) and one geological fault, the excavation of which was abandoned when it reached 12 feet - the length of the JCB bucket - and still had not reached water!
The basic problem, is clearly that you don't know what you are getting. I understand that when using bent coathangers, if the rods go out, its a solid feature, and if they go in, its negative (this is archaeological dowsing, which works for me), but I would not like to comment on the likelyhood of detecting coal seams at depths up to 200 feet........
Robert Waterhouse
>
> From: Simon Chapman <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue 29/Jul/2003 10:02 GMT
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Dowsing
>
> Some advice please particularly from anyone with the necessary experience, which I haven't.
>
> I recently borrowed a map made up from O.S. 1:2500 sheets on which has been drawn the extensive underground workings of several mines which worked stratified ironstone in three separate seams. These mines are declared to have been active c.1870 but the map was compiled in 1988 from information obtained by dowsing.
>
> The compiler has used this information to produce an estimate of over 2 million tons of output during about 6 years of active mining, with a suggestion of export from the area.
> Further maps by the same compiler exist for other areas and one at least has been used by a local author in the only book so far published regarding the mining history of one locality.
>
> I have no quibble with dowsing in general as my youngest son was at one time very good at it, but that was not mining related. However, these mines, described as "Lost" on the map, do not appear in the Mineral Statistics, nor have I found any documentary reference to them. In the Geological Survey Memoirs of 1892 the working of the relevant seams is described and is at odds with these maps.
>
> These maps and the information they contain appears honest and the date is February 1988, not April 1st. Seam depths are from surface to 200 feet deep at most, each seam perhaps two feet thick but not all three worked one above the other, with an estimated 50% extraction.
>
> My query therefore is how much reliance should I place on maps of such underground workings obtained by dowsing?
>
> Regards, Simon.
>
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