Dowsing at Springhead near Gravesend in the 1950s

By Victor Smith

Long forgotten and recently discovered in a photographic collection are several images of uncertain date in the 1950s showing the late Bill Penn, the Gravesend Historical Society’s Director of Excavations, trying out dowsing rods on the site of the Romano-British religious centre at Springhead.

In those days archaeological prospecting at Springhead was mostly through the plotting of crop marks and the study of aerial photographs as well as augering and walking over ploughed fields to look for concentrations of surface evidence. Occasionally dowsing was attempted. Geophysical prospecting had hardly asserted itself in British archaeology.

As a scientist, Bill Penn was a trained sceptic, and he decided to subject dowsing to methodological testing. Having received some initial coaching from a visiting dowser, he did this with carefully laid out traverses over part of One Tree Field at Springhead where stakes were inserted into the ground at the places where the rods closed and opened. This produced a rectangle on the ground, subsequently confirmed by excavation as a Roman building. This impressed

Bill and the excavators around him but the results were not scientifically explicable. Although this was a memorable achievement, dowsing was subsequently used only fitfully at Springhead. As soon as electrical resistivity surveying became available at the start of the 1970s through the loan of equipment from the Kent Archaeological Society, this method was used. The equipment was very slow but produced reasonable results. As a small diversion, the author was tempted to dowse and, in doing so, discovered the edges of a previously uninvestigated length of Roman road, also at

Springhead. When, in 1989, he came to manage an historic National

Park in the Caribbean, he dowsed on the property, identifying the exact edges of previously unknown buried structures. He later found out that he had been watched and that this had begun a short dowsing craze on part of the island, with wire coat-hangers being taken by maids from the rooms of two hotels at the request of those who wished to make the rods.

The author inclines to rely upon geophysics, most recently under the leadership of the Gravesend Historical Society’s Verna Row, also at Springhead. The Kent Archaeological Society has several times replaced the originally bought equipment with better, quicker and more versatile instruments.

The author retains dowsing rods for very occasional and responsible ‘recreational use’, avoiding any possibility of addiction. It would be interesting for any dowsing readers to share their experiences in the pages of this newsletter. Discussion of the effectiveness of dowsing tends to go round in a circle and then back round the other way, not least because there is no universally accepted scientific validation of this method of investigation.

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Bill Penn dowsing

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Part of the rectangle staked out on the ground

Author’s note:

The author began excavating at Springhead in 1961 when he heard of the dowsing success on the site, now supported by the photographs (with kind thanks to the late Phillip Connolly), which appear with this article.