A leak at a village social club in the Midlands baffled all the hi-tech gadgetry of a giant water company.
But the problem was eventually sorted out by an ancient mystical art which dates back thousands of years.
While workmates scratched their heads, one Severn Trent Water engineer produced a set of water-divining rods and quickly found the right spot.
“It was amazing,” said Barry Phillips, secretary of Wootton Wawen Social Club in Warwickshire.
“I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
“I even had a go with the rods myself – and it worked for me, too!”
The 200-member social club became alarmed three months ago when Severn Trent doubled its monthly direct debit because water consumption had shot up. The committee suspected a leak because no extra taps or toilets had been installed.
Nor had there been an upsurge in members.
Severn Trent Water sent out teams of engineers four times to try to locate the source of the leak – but without success.
That was despite the £1.8 billion conglomerate equipping staff with a whole range of hi-tech detection equipment, including radiowave technology, CCTV probes, special dyes and even gases.
It was thought – quite rightly, as it turned out – that the leak was somewhere along the 40-yard drive linking the club to the main road.
But the problem was: where?
To dig up the whole tarmac drive would have been costly, time-consuming and disruptive to club members arriving by car.
Retired civil servant Barry, 81, who lives in the village, said: “We seemed to be getting nowhere when one of the Severn Trent engineers fetched a set of water-divining rods from his van.
“He slowly walked along the drive with one rod in each hand, held out horizontally in front of him.
“Suddenly, the rods moved towards each other and the engineer stopped and said it was probably the spot. The drive was excavated, the leak located and the repair carried out. I had heard of water-divining before but I had never seen it in action.
“The club is delighted that the problem has been sorted out and we are now in discussions with Severn Trent about a refund on our over-paid bill.”
Last night, a spokesman for Severn Trent Water, which has 4.3 million customers, said: “We deal with thousands of leaks every year and our aim is to ensure that this is done quickly and efficiently.
“As a very large business, we have a huge range of cutting-edge technology to locate leaks and have recently introduced a revolutionary system, LeakFinder ST, which can pinpoint leaks very quickly and accurately.
“But there are all sorts of ways of locating a leak and we know that some of our engineers have their own water-divining rods, which they use occasionally.
“In days gone by, these rods were used much more extensively. As long as the leak is found and repaired quickly – by whatever means – we’re happy and so is the customer.”
Water divining – also known as dowsing or water-witching – has been practised for thousands of years.
But it became very popular in medieval times for locating the source of clear drinking water, although it was often associated with sorcery.
Traditionally, the most common divining rod was a Y-shaped hazel branch. The dowsers held the double-end in each hand and the single-end twitched and bent downwards when water was found.
More recently, dowsing rods have also been made of two separate metal rods, as in the Wootton Wawen case. Divining has been dismissed as hokum but a scientific study carried out in Germany during the late 1980s concluded that some dowsers achieved ‘an extraordinarily high’ success rate.
A spokeswoman for The British Society of Dowsers, based in Hanley Swan, Worcestershire, said: “Dowsing works – although we don’t know exactly why. It’s a gift that some people have.”