Throughout the 1980s, a fascinating walking tour operated from one of the bookshops in Avebury. A guide appeared outside the shop at an appointed time and took the assembled party a walk round the stones. At one point to demonstrate the 'earth energy' in the area he issued forked spring rods and angle rods and asked everyone to walk in single file through a gap between two stones. The rods nearly jumped out of our hands. Everyone in the party experienced this; it was certainly not imaginary. Unknown to ourselves, we were walking over the site of a missing stone.

Dowsers all over the world have felt this type of response, but in Britain, by a leap of faith, some of them have managed to combine the ideas of "earth energy" and ley-lines into one. Arthur Lawton of the Straight Track Portfolio Club suggested this as an alternative theory to archaic tracks in 1927 so the idea is not new.

Archaeology is perhaps more of a humanity than a science, but it must be tested using scientific principles and all science is based on repeatable experiments.

On field trips, outings, open days and lectures, I have witnessed the prowess of at least 40 dowsers in the field. No matter where the tests took place, no dowser ever walked more than 30 metres without picking up a line. They found lines everywhere; but spaced 30 metres apart, no two dowsers ever came up with the same lines.
Some were convinced they could trace the PSAs on my map by dowsing, but they had not allowed for map to field magnetic variation and were wrong in every instance.

They were honest, intelligent people, sensitive to the dowsing response. They were looking for alignments the same as I was, but whatever they were finding, it had absolutely no demonstrateable connection with Prehistoric Site Alignments.