DOWSING AND ARCHAEOLOGY

Water-lines may not in themselves be real, but they do at least tally with something physical' underground. We can't so easily say the same of Underwood's track-lines and aquastats. In practical dowsing work, water-lines seem reassuringly solid, and have a definite 'feel' of depth to them; but the track-lines and aquastats seem only to be surface phenomena, and to be far more ephemeral. Underwood never actually defined what track-lines and aquastats were, and it seems he only assumed that they were 'lines of electromagnetic equipotential'.

We've seen that if we agree with his assumption, we get trapped by the conundrum of 'Which came first, the patterns or the structures?'. The way out of that trap is to look elsewhere for the 'cause' of at least some of those patterns: and one 'cause' which seems to make a great deal of sense, particularly in relation to tracks, boundaries and the like, is some kind of interaction between certain qualities of a place and aspects of the minds of people passing by. If this is so, then what Underwood observed as aquastats and tracklines could in some cases be memories – if you like – of the meeting of people and place: and Underwood's results do tally more closely with that interpretation than they do with his rigid theory of the 'pattern of the past'.

This idea of track-lines and aquastats as memories is not as strange as it may seem at first. Even a physical track is a memory, in a sense, of people and animals that have passed along it. Imagine a bare heath, with no tracks on it at all: to cross it you would have to push a pathway through the bracken and gorse. But next time you pass that way, would you make a new path? Probably not: it's much easier to follow an existing path than to make a new one. Each time you pass that way, you wear down the track still further, reinforcing it as a memory of your passing. You leave the district, and the path falls into disuse: but it is still there as a memory of you and your passing that way – a memory at first as a bare line across the heath, then later (as it silts up, and conserves moisture better than elsewhere) as a line of denser undergrowth. You retain memories of your walking that path: it retains memories of you.

It seems that it retains those memories in more than just the sense of a worn pathway. Underwood's critics, with their idea of the 'pattern of the present', suggested that some of the patterns were 'electrical phenomena consequent upon disturbance of the earth's surface by man', and this is probably true in many cases.[26] But we can go beyond this, to suggest that it retains memories outside of a purely physical sense: we can say that such a trackway retains a ghost of you, to be seen or felt by other people passing by.