Leyline Lunacy: What UK Detectorists Say About the Past

Dowsers talking to their dowsing rods

An artefact hunter 'Chris' ('Gloucester dig, Slimbridge 16th July 100 acres of freshly cut pasture' Let's Go Digging [up Archaeology for Personal Entertainment and Profit],  June 14, 2017) as a result of his collecting portable antiquities reckons this is how the past looked:

“One of the main features of Roman roads is that they are usually remarkably straight. There is a theory that this may be because the Romans used dowsing to plot the route in the first place. If you stand in Bath and ask your dowsing rods the whereabouts of Salisbury, you will get a one-direction straight answer. 

Another guy ('what have the Romans ever done for us?') reckons it was the Druids wot done it.

There are a whole load of straight highways in Poland built through the dense forest from one city to another between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sadly nobody here has found any documentary evidence that the Tsarist engineers who were responsible for the ones I tend to travel most often 'asked dowsing rods' to get from Warsaw to Białystok.

As a matter of interest, can anybody tell us the number of Treasures reported under the Treasure act were found by dowsing rather than metal detector? That statistic should give a pretty good indication of the degree to which 'dowsing works'. How many? The database seems not to want to say - maybe we need to search it with dowsing rods.