Why some say Scottish Water should make more use of 'witchcraft' to find burst pipes

Sally Le Page, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, says the water company's use of rods and divination to establish the presence of water and pipes is "unjustified" because "it doesn't work".

But Fay Palmer of the British Society of Dowsers refutes this saying their art has hit hard over the years because of its reputation as witchcraft.

She says water companies like Scottish Water should actually make more use of the the ancient practice of holding twigs or metal rods that are supposed to move in response to hidden objects, saying the practice has been wrongly debunked as witchcraft.

Dowsing is often used to look for water, and farmers in California have been known to ask dowsers to find ways to irrigate their land.

Several of Britain’s biggest water companies, including Scottish Water admitted that engineers still use dowsing rods to divine the location of water pipes and leaks after being challenged by Ms Le Page.

Scottish Water has defended its use even though it is understood that new technology is use the vast majority of the time. But it would not answer questions on how it has helped them.

A spokesman said: “Some of our water operatives use this as one way of establishing the presence of water and pipes. However, it is a very small part of the range of equipment we use for this purpose and would never be the only method. We use modern technology such as ground microphones, correlators, metal detectors and other devices to pinpoint the exact location of underground assets and leaks.”

The practice of dowsing, which dates from medieval times, involves using two L-shaped rods to find hidden water. It has been derided as superstition by many for centuries and has not been found to be reliable by scientists.

Most sceptics accept the explanation of William Carpenter from 1852 in that the rod moves due to involuntary motor behaviour, which he described as ideomotor action. The view was that muscle movements caused by subconscious brain activity make anything handheld move, although it looks and feels as if the movements are involuntary.

The same phenomenon was said to lie behind movements of objects on a Ouija board.

A double-blind test of dowsers' skills in the late '80s concluded that 37 out of 43 could not find a hidden pipe, while the results from the successful six were said to be better than chance, resulting in the experimenters' conclusion that some dowsers "in particular tasks, showed an extraordinarily high rate of success". He further pointed out that the six "good" dowsers did not perform any better than chance in separate tests.

Ms Palmer debunks the debunkers saying: "It does work. I nearly died when it was described as witchcraft. "People are looking in the wrong place for evidence. The double-blind experiment was a very poor one in the 1980s, which dowsers in a test environment. It doesn't work when you do that, because of the conscious state the dowsers have to get into to be accurate. You have to be a particular mental state which is not good in a test environment.

"I think water companies should be applauded for using dowsers, because it is a green cheap sustainable technology. Dowsing in the right hands can be very accurate. You can walk along the pipe and find the leak in seconds.

"Because of the connotations, coming out of the 1700s and the Witchcraft Act at that point in time dowsing was seen as agnostic practice and it was decreed to be heretical. After that you couldn't do it. Before that there were big manuals on how to detect mines.

"After a church decree you could only do it if you were an unlettered man, so you had to be thick, ignorant or poor. You couldn't write down how to do it, you couldn't teach people how to do it. You could only do it for water and god forbid if you did it if you were a woman.

"So that reputation of it being heretical witchcraft is what you are now hearing again, like a modern day witch-hunt, it's that dogma. It's now about getting over people's dogma that there is something here. It should be more used."

Ms Le Page, who is also a science YouTuber, asked the water companies if they used dowsing after her parents told her they had seen an engineer from Severn Trent “walking around holding two bent tent pegs to locate a pipe” in Stratford-upon-Avon.

“You could just laugh this off,” she wrote. “Except if they get it wrong, that could mean the difference between an entire town having safe drinking water or not. If they use divining rods to decide that there isn’t a pipe underneath and so it’s safe to dig there, they could rupture the mains water supply for thousands of people.”

Only Wessex Water and Northern Ireland Water said they did not use divining rods.

Ms Palmer said dowsing "appears to use the "subliminal subconscious mind, not the conscious".

"What the body is able to do and trained dowsers are able to do is pick up on clues, changes to partly electromagnetic fields, and partly mindfields that extend beyond the body," she said. "We focus our mind on a particular thing, it could be a water leak, and tell our body to pick up a clue from the environment to the presence of that thing.

"Because your subliminal subconscious mind does not use language, it does not speak English, the only thing it can do is to give you a small muscular twitch, to tell you you are over it and hence the dowsing tool moves to tell you your body has picked up the presence of the leak."