Former estate agent Adrian Incledon-Webber is on the right lines – energy lines, that is – with his new career as a dowser – where swings in the property market once occupied his attention, it\’s now the swings of dowsing rods and pendulums that he\’s attuned to.

How did it all come about? During his 22 years as an estate agent, Adrian noticed the phenomenon of the ‘divorce house’, the property that continually came back on the market after marital breakdown.

‘It became a fascination for me,’ he said. ‘Several houses were coming on the market every three years, almost to the day. There was one that was a classic divorce house which I saw coming back on the market regularly over 20 years. It was a big Victorian house which didn’t feel homely and always felt very cold when I walked in. It was the same with a number of other houses.’

Adrian wondered why other houses sold well, apart from location and decorative order, while others remained on the market for many months and often stayed unsold. The atmosphere of these houses was strange and uninviting when he visited them, and when following up a viewing he was often told that \’something didn\’t feel right\’ or the house had a \’funny feeling\’. It didn\’t matter what the owners did to improve the property – the comments remained the same.

It was only after he started on his path to becoming a professional dowser and tutor four years ago – a practice he now runs with his wife Allyson from their 18th-century farmhouse home at Cherhill, Wiltshire – that he discovered the cause of all this must have been geopathic stress.

‘It wasn’t just the stress of life that was causing the problems but something in the very fabric of the building that forced seemingly happy couples to end their marriage and seek the divorce courts,\’ said Adrian. \’Dowsing rods and pendulums can be used as diagnostic tools. All you need to do is find out how to use them properly and then ask the right questions.’

The term \’geopathic\’ means literally ‘illness produced from the earth’. Adrian likens the Earth to a massive electricity generator and capacitor which stores a huge amount of energy which is constantly fluctuating. These distortions produce a natural radiation which, brought to the surface through geological fault lines, mineral concentrations, underground cavities and subterranean water, creates problems for people in their homes.

It is believed to be a cause of physical and mental illness, stress, hyperactivity, allergies, domestic strife and conflict, and even birth and conception problems. The radiation is said to attack the natural rhythms and balance of the body, weakening immune systems and reducing the ability to fend off disease, but that a holistic dowsing approach can neutralise its effects. Geopathic stress is widely recognised in Europe; in Poland and Austria, for example, dowsers are called in officially to test sites before house building begins.

The pendulum has swung a long way today from dowsing’s traditional origins of water and minerals divining. In the past 15 years, earth energies have become the biggest growth area of interest among members of the well-respected and long-established British Society of Dowsers (founded 1933). Adrian found out about geopathic stress after joining the BSD and visiting the Avebury stone circle on an earth energies course.

‘I was bitten by the bug after that,’ said Adrian, who is now a vice-president of the BSD, chairman of its earth energies group, and teaches a range of courses including dowsing for beginners, dealing with geopathic stress, dowsing for health, and also geomancy, the art of analysing and harmonising earth energies, often equated with Chinese feng-shui.

Immediately, he wondered if earth energies had anything to do with the divorce houses. He was soon convinced that they did. He now believes that every house is affected by geopathic stress to some extent. So far, he has ‘cleared’ more than 350, to the evident relief of their occupants, some of whom were rather sceptical at the outset, but that’s an attitude he welcomes – and enjoys overturning.

As an estate agent, Adrian had always felt something was missing when a sale went through. One family was moving out, but what about the energies that were being left for the next family to inherit? This was partly why he launched Dowsing Spirits, a venture in which he is assisted by Allyson and two associates, Andrew Cox, from Hinton Blewitt in North East Somerset, and Stuart Stott, from the Manchester area, whom he has trained.

\’If anyone had told me ten years ago that I would be doing this, I would have thought them crazy, yet there seems to be no shortage of work,\’ Adrian added. \’Maybe it\’s time for estate agents to employ geomancers at the start and finish of the house-selling process. It would make everybody\’s life easier.\’

When he dowses for geopathic stress in people\’s homes or at business premises, Adrian works to a checklist of 30 items, including underground streams, earth energy lines and spirals, ley lines, underground cables and nearby masts and pylons, and \’emotional/conflict\’ energy areas. Using his rods like \’magic wands\’ he is able to influence their effects.

\’Healing a home and its occupants is all about harmonising the energies, ensuring that they co-exist with the energy lines and spirals,\’ he said. ‘It’s almost like the power of prayer. You are calling on a higher consciousness – I call it ‘spiritual rewiring’. It’s really the power of intent, the power of beneficial thought.

\’The streams will be moved from underneath the house – it usually takes 24-48 hours – to run instead beneath gardens, pathways and roads where the radiation will be harmlessly released into the air. Their home should start to feel better almost straight away. One client said it was like putting on a pair of glasses and seeing everything with sharper edges – the \”haze\” had gone. Another said she felt a great weight was lifted from her shoulders.\’

Dowsing for Adrian goes back to his childhood. At seven years old, he sent to a mail-order firm from Cyprus – where his father was stationed in the RAF – for a metal detector but received a pair of dowsing rods instead, much to his initial annoyance! ‘I still remember how angry I was,’ he said. ‘It cost me 2s 6d, which was a week’s pocket money. As a child your imagination runs riot over what you might turn up with a metal detector. It was a child’s fascination with finding buried treasure and so on. In the cliffs near Akrotiri were all these caves and ancient tombs. It seemed like eight months waiting for the parcel to arrive, but it was probably only six to eight weeks. But I went out with the dowsing rods – I didn’t find any treasure but I did find underground pipes and so on.’

He took up the dowsing rods again in the early 1980s when he was working as an antiques dealer in London, and beginning to feel there was more to life than the pursuit of money in a ‘materialistic world’. He started looking into alternative spiritualities, including Buddhism, and into palmistry and mediumship. He had always been a strongly intuitive person, and had often felt he had psychic abilities.

Adrian sold his Surrey estate agency in 2004 and moved first to Hampshire and then to Cherhill in the autumn of 2009 to be near Avebury and other prehistoric monuments, such as Silbury Hill and the West Kennet long barrow, where much of his earth energies dowsing was taking place.

At present, Adrian is devoting his energies to writing a DIY – ‘dowse it yourself’ – handbook for people who want to tackle geopathic stress in their own homes, and launching a study aimed at proving how dowsing actually works and bringing it to the attention of a wider public.

In the study, which will last for at least a year and possibly two, Adrian will be working with medical electronics specialist and biophysicist Giovanni Orlando, of Chippenham, and fellow dowser Hugo Jenks, from West Sussex, It will focus on a study group of 10-12 people – a mixture of experienced dowsers, healers and non-dowsers – and, using brain and body scanning techniques, will measure their neuro-physiological responses as they wield rods and pendulums.

‘We want to bring in the public and perhaps stimulate interest among scientists,’ said Adrian. ‘We want to find out where the dowsing response comes from. We know there’s a muscular response but we want to find out why it happens. Many people really deserve to be able to dowse. People still tend to think of it as devil worship, something they shouldn’t be dealing with, but we want to bring it into people’s lives so they can benefit from it, and to try to take away the mystery and mystique from it.’

He hopes his investigation will succeed in proving the validity of dowsing where other scientific studies since the 1940s, in New Zealand, the USA and Germany, have been inconclusive.

Adrian is also a Reiki practitioner and a qualified holistic masseur. ‘Reiki’, from the Japanese meaning ‘universal life-force energy’, is a complementary health treatment often called \’palm healing\’.

Visit Adrian\’s website at www.dowsingspirits.co.uk  and the British Society of Dowsers at www.britishdowsers.org