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01 April 1998
Divine Intervention
By Jim Murray

From a distance it makes for a bizarre sight:a tallish figure of a man, naked except for a pair of underpants and metalcapped knee-high rubber Wellington boots.

In his hand is a piece of wood which he holds in front of him and follows. Every now and then the wood will stop pointing forward and jut accusingly towards the ground. The man will stop in his tracks and mark the spot carefully before moving on. In truth, this phenomenon looks a little less strange from close up and each time he is sighted it is within a few miles of a Scottish malt whisky distillery. A strange coincidence? A future episode of The X-Files? Well, actually, no. Because what is going on here is probably the very last true piece of mysticism left in the whisky maker's art.

This peculiar ritual is part and parcel of man's constant search for water, the lifeblood of every distillery. And every couple of weeks Murdo Beaton is called away from his home in the tiny whisky town of Alness on the Cromarty Firth to answer yet another distillery manager's desperate plea to fllld more cool, sweet, pure spring water. Murdo responds to the call by applying one of nature's most curious tricks. He divines. In other words, he holds a piece of 'Y' shaped wood loosely in his hand until it twitches and points downwards to where, invariably, several feet below, there is a spring. Spooky, eh? Not for Murdo: "I grew up with this and it works every time," he explains with the soft lilt to his Northern Highland accent which betrays his lifelong afflllity with the area. "I came from a family of ten children, eight girls and two boys. This was just after the second world war and we lived in a crofter's cottage with no running water from taps. My father was a gamekeeper, and he used to take me out and by divining, locate nearby springs so we always had enough to drink and cook with ... and on Mondays clean all the clothes."

It was all art his father learned from his father, and Murdo admits he would not be surprised if the learning process went back several centuries, generation upon generation. It was also an art practiced by settlers in the United States in the very earliest days. Wherever the homesteaders built their cabin, water had to be nearby.

Talk to the old timers in the distilling states of the U.S., like Missouri, and they will tell you tales of how their grand-daddy did the same as Murdo Beaton. But they will be hard-pressed to tell you who still does it now. In the early days of the Puritan colonists, this method of locating water was regarded as a form of witchcraft, hence the term, 'Water Witching,' still used in the U.S. today. A thick twig of hazel is Murdo's daily tool of work.

He is not always alone when searching for water. Sometimes he employs a couple of men to join him: flllding the water is the easy part - it is the laborious digging and attaching pipes which needs the more earthly currency of muscle and sinew. "Sometimes they have a go at divining as well," he says. "They might use two pieces of wire, like straightened coat hangers, and when they start crossing you know you have something."

While Murdo may not be the only person divining for Scotland's distilleries, the work he has carried out over the last two or three years has made him the busiest and most well respected. He had followed in his father's footsteps by also becoming a game-keeper after he had teamed up with American troops while fIghting in Korea. His love of the wild and his native highlands led him to a life which has been mostly spent in the great outdoors. He even gave up his trade as a carpenter: "I sickened of it. I wanted to work where there was water - with ditches and drains." It was when he received a call from his local Teaninich distillery in Alness that things began moving for Murdo.

The distillery had over recent years been surrounded by an industrial estate and the normal watercourse had found its way blocked by rotten mattresses and other town-associated rubbish. His job was to fmd new sources of pure water and fast. He was also employed to install pipes and build holding tanks. He was so successful that within weeks his phone was ringing again. This time it was Willie Meikle at Glen Ord, also in need of some water sourcing. His name spread rapidly among highly impressed - if not amazed - distillery managers within the United Distillers group and since then he has worked on Glen Elgin, Linkwood, Dufftown, Brackla, Talisker, Mortlach, Craigellachie, Cardhu, Cragganmore and Dailuaine.

The caravan he takes with him has become a common sight on the lands surrounding those homes of whisky, as has his black Labrador, Dean.  His experience over the years leaves Murdo in no doubt that he is in close harmony with the land he works: "It's funny. The moment I taste that pure spring water for the fIrst time I can tell exactly how the chemical analysis will come back. The only spring I ever found which I thought might be suspect was at Talisker on Skye. That's a real tricky place to work because there are a lot of iron ore deposits in the rocks around the distillery - and iron is the one thing that will ruin whisky. I found this particular spring, dug down, found the water,' tasted it, and although it was clear, there was something just not right about it. Within a few days the clear water had given way to orange. It was contaminated with iron and was useless."

Spending time with Murdo can be fascinating. Apart from his uncanny ability to fmd underground water in areas where it had sometimes thought there had been none, his digging which can be anything from three to ten feet deep - can unearth original old workings from over a century ago when the Victorians building the distillery were tapping into the water supplies. Sometimes it was thought that the water had dried up. It has since been discovered that occasionally the water was there all the time - it was just that that the piping had corroded or had been somehow clogged. He has even found a silver sports trophy presented to a runner at the turn of the century.

Distillery managers throughout Scotland are taking a keen interest in Murdo's talents. Most will tell you that there is not the water around that there was a decade ago after successive dry winters and summers. And in the making of whisky, distilleries need water not just for mashing but also for cooling purposes. Even one distillery manager from just up the road from Alness at Tain, Dr Bill Lumsden, a scientist and a confirmed sceptic of many of the old stories that accompany certain distilling practices (for instance, he cannot see how a wooden fermenter can do a better job than a stainless steel one) admits that in the unlikely event of his two main springs running dry he would not have any hesitation in calling in Murdo. But of course at distilleries like Glenmorangie he would have to be careful. The water used there is very hard, having run through limestone and to keep the shape of the whisky he would have to fmd water running through identical strata. Having said that, Murdo has discovered that the distilleries of Dufftown and Mortlach use exactly the same water supply for their whisky. And no one will ever convince me that the two should ever be mentioned in the same breath, the make of Mortlach being so infmitely superior.

Although the strange mysticism surrounding divining dates back to Greek and Roman times - it is even believed that mythical wands and staffs were in fact diviners - not everyone has the talent to use them. What is not in doubt is that, for some, it works with extraordinary precision though no one can fully explain why. Magnetic fIelds and ancient forces connected with ley-lines have been offered up as possible theories. What it certainly hasn't anything to do with is Murdo's underwear. "No, I just strip off because it gets very hot up in those hills. I'm miles from anywhere, the midges don't seem to mind me, so I get the chance for a good tan." This article first appeared in the Malt Advocate"

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