Background to Quicksilver:

Background to Serpent's Gold:

dowsingWolfie, Tala and Zi’ib, the children in Quicksilver and Serpent’s Gold discover that they have an amazing ability to dowse.

Dowsing is the ability to search for things, usually with the aid of a hand-held instrument such as a forked stick, a pair of metal rods or a pendulum. It is a very ancient art, originally used to find water or precious minerals like gold, silver or coal. Some dowsers claim to be able to find lost objects like keys and many say that they can pick up the energies in ley lines. No one is sure of the origin of the word dowsing and it may be just a strange coincidence that during the reign of King Henry Vlll a schoolmaster called George Dowsing was employed as a “hill digger” to search for buried treasure.

Although many people remain sceptical about dowsing there are hundreds of professional dowsers who make their living searching for water and I have seen some of them at work. The US marines even experimented with using dowsing rods to detect underground tunnels and explosive devices during the Vietnam War of the 1960s.