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T C Lethbridge – The Power of the Pendulum

Although I have known for many years that I could find hidden water movements and have even found a lost Anglo-Saxon cemetery by the same method, I took no great interest in the possibilities until we had left Cambridge and returned to live in our native West Country. Early in our life back here there was a long summer drought and not enough water to drive the hydraulic ram. We had an alternative water supply but it was clear that the ram ought to be started again by clearing the spring outlets leading to it. There was no plan of where these outlets were and a five-acres field to search. I remembered my experiments in divination years before and cut some hazel forks from the wood. There was no difficulty at all.

I found four sources of water, within less than a yard of their positions, in an afternoon. Nothing showed on the surface of the field, although the pipes from two springs ran through a dry, mediaeval fish pond. This was quite enough to convince anyone with normal intelligence that water divining was a useful fact and not useless nonsense.

The hazel fork is hardly an instrument of precision. You cannot observe within a hand's breadth where the movement takes place. Wishing for a more exact instrument, I turned to something I had read long before. This was a pamphlet by a French brigadier, who in the First World War had located German mines in the sea with a pendulum.

The soldier has to train his powers of observation, and he travels about the world. Therefore he has a chance to learn something. I doubt if you could find any regiment without one or two acute observers in its ranks. So when a brigadier said he could locate mines with a pendulum, I believed him and made one for myself.