Exploring sewage drains, crackpots and leylines, Dowsing for metals and water.

Bill finds a major sewage spill at Wandlebury and ends up exploring underground pipes to clear the blockage. Myths associated with the Ring and some of the more crackpot theories regarding leylines centered on the ring. On Bill's dowsing skills for metal, water and disturbed ground.

PPE Stonehenge - photocollage Chris Thomas

Extracts from part of Chapter 7 in Bill Clark's autobiography Route and Branch. You can listen to a full reading here: https://archive.org/download/sewage-crackpots-and-leylines/Ch7c-Sewage-crackpots%20and%20leylines.mp3

Unfortunately other work was piling up for me – literally. I had found a sewage puddle in the bottom of the Ring Ditch – the drainage system was blocked. If it backed up to the dwellings and public lavatories that it served, it could be serious. The extra pressure could burst the old pipes, allowing sewage to leak into the 56.360 metre (186 feet) deep well which served all the estate: even worse, it would be directly in the water table that supplied the City of Cambridge. ...

...Transferring my search to the next line brought me to an iron cover under a thin covering of leaves, full to the brim but less than two metres deep. That evening, having mustered three of the residents together, I tied my new climbing rope around my waist, gave instructions that if I stopped snatching the line once every 10 seconds, to call an ambulance – and try and drag me out. I moved quickly along the smelly tunnel, stopping at the brickwork of the deep manhole blocking three quarters of the tunnel width, and there in the torch light could see relatively new pipe work, constructed in a tight double bend. No wonder it had blocked! And, there was no way that drain rods could pass through it – the old drain had been by-passed. The next day a sewage tanker pumped out both pits, and it then took me all afternoon – employing one hundred hired drain rods – to drag out a tree root and the lost, rotten, estate drain rods, via a third pit, and finally, an unpleasant few minutes to climb down and hook out the blockage in the deep manhole. Job done, I hurled my overalls in the dustbin, washed vigorously under the outside tap, and whilst still in a suitable frame of mind, phoned the Agents to complain about their lack of recording, and their unsuitably aligned drain.

...Many of our visitors look at Wandlebury in an entirely different light, the Ring Ditch is all that remains to be seen of the Iron Age Hill Fort, and is the most visited part of Wandlebury. Despite the inner area bearing the last vestiges of a Mansion and the remaining stables and coach houses – now converted to houses, office and an education centre – a walk round the circumference still has a certain aura, which can be heightened considerably in mist or by moonlight. Since early times there has been disagreement over its origins. Fiction and legend abound...

...Much of this interest, I am sure, was due to a certain Tom Lethbridge! In December 1956, after two years of research and thumping an iron bar into the soil to find the previously disturbed area, he finally dug out a chalk figure. His snap decision was, “It is anyone's guess who this chap is. Mine is that he is a Sun God!” Most press mentions of Wandlebury still insist on using a copy of an aerial photo of Tom Lethbridge’s partly excavated ‘Goddess’ which was printed in ‘The Times’ in 1956. Because of the trickle of visitors asking questions about it, I had already read up on it, and as many wanted to see it, had also removed the covering vegetation. Gradually it became a magnet for dowsing enthusiasts determined to find out for themselves – is it or isn’t it? A popular cry was, and still is, ‘Is it on a Ley Line?’ The most excited folk found a number of Ley Lines heading straight for it, and I often found myself embroiled in animated conversation! Strangely, although Lethbridge himself had long been a hazel twig dowser, looking for ancient graves and such, and later wrote about the use of the pendulum and paranormal activities, he didn’t use these methods to try to locate his figure...

On Dowsing
For a full history of my own dowsing skills, I need to go back to my childhood. I first tried to dowse in the company of my grandfather, who was using a forked hazel stick to look for a lost well. I was useless. Later, I saw a professional water diviner at work. ‘You should use a willow stick.’ I was still useless! Then in the 1950s, whilst I was working with earth moving equipment, an engineer showed me how to find an underground cable, using a couple of brass welding rods, bent in an L shape. From then on I regularly used them, it was the best grounding – no pun intended – in dowsing that anyone could wish for. At first, I only looked for electric cables – alive or dead – iron, copper or lead pipes, house drains and clay field drains. If any were water-filled I got an especially good ‘kick’ which led me to believe ...