Learning to dowse. The ghostly knight

Bill talks about how he learnt to dowse successfully with metal rods when a hazel twig did not work. Then there is the story of the ghostly knight who could be challenged in the Wandlebury Ring, to win a horse.

Knights ready for the joust. photo Chris Thomas

Extract from a reading of chapter 7 from Bill Clark's autobiography, Route and Branch. Full podcast here: https://archive.org/download/learning-to-dowse-and-ghostly-rider/Ch7d-Learning-to-dowse-and-ghostly-rider.mp3


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 that I could find water too, and did! A good party trick was to pass them over a glass of beer, and see them clash together.

Because I usually uncovered my finds later, I knew for certain what lay below. Once, when excavating low lying farmland ready for a factory to be built, I was puzzled to find nothing where my rods had strongly indicated, until I realised, lines of different soil colour was showing filled in trenches – and I remembered grandfather describing how they used to drain fields with ‘bush drains’ by burying the hedge trimmings in the bottom of trenches...

...One old tale, oft repeated, cannot be established by either dowsing or the archaeologists’ trowel. It is of Baron Osbert’s fight with a ghostly knight who was said to terrorise the area. The accepted mode of doing business with the ghost, was to ride alone into the Ring (when the present circular ditch still had a high bank inside it, and a second ditch and bank inside that) on a moonlight night and issue a challenge. According to who you read, it was either: ‘Knight, tonight come forth’, or ‘Knight to knight come forth’. Shortly after hearing the Norman Knight’s ringing challenge, the group waiting outside are said to have heard the clash of swords, soon followed by the triumphant Baron leading out a magnificent horse: he related how he had unseated the rider, who had then thrown his lance and pierced his thigh. The prancing horse was taken in procession to Cambridge, but at sunrise it reared up, broke its tether and disappeared. As for the Baron, it is said that on every anniversary of the fight, his wound would open and bleed. I have often wondered if this story tells us that a bandit once used Wandlebury as a hideout: and whether anyone happened to hear a shrill whistle, moments before the horse reared up and broke away from its tether?