My brother-in-law has bought some land near to us here in France, and this is not his first rodeo. One of the things he did with his first house, built eighteen years ago in the village down the hill, was put in a geothermal heating system. Back then, there was almost no information about how to do this, and very little expertise, so he relied heavily on his own engineering genius, and succeeded in putting in a system that heats his home (with underfloor heating, natch) for a fraction of the price of a conventional boiler.

Nowadays, French building regulations have caught up with him, and everybody needs to build to a certain level of energy efficiency.

One of the things you need for a geothermal heating system is a source of water. 

When you have a plot of land and you want to know where to dig for water, you need a water diviner.

This guy, the guy we’re talking about, doesn’t use a switch of willow or dowsing rods. He uses his hands.

Before he became a water diviner, he was working for one of the large employers around here, and it came to pass that he got a new position with a new office. He moved into the office and started his new job, but he didn’t feel happy. He started to get depressed. Really depressed. It was something to do with the office, he thought, a bad vibe.

It turned out that the two previous occupants of that same office had also got depressed. And both of them had committed suicide.

The guy who would become a water diviner rearranged the furniture in the office, and things seemed to improve. The bad vibe was less present, but it didn’t go entirely away. So he quit, and decided to, ahem, try his hand at water divining.

So he came around to my brother-in-law’s new bit of land the other day, and suggested two places to dig. He’d brought his son with him. Just for fun, he got his son to see if he could work out where water was. The son said, “I feel something here, and I feel something stronger over here.”

He said it in French, obviously.

The water diviner suggested two places to dig. He said one was about eight meters down, and the other was deeper. He charges fees based on how far you have to dig. And if you find nothing, you just pay his expenses.

So we’ll see if he’s right about where to dig, but I’ve got a feeling in my own water that he almost certainly was.