Hamish Miller, one of Britain's best known, most highly respected and certainly best-loved dowsers, has died at his home near Lelant in Cornwall aged 82, writes Nigel Twinn.

He was born in Bo'ness, Scotland, in 1927, the son of a dentist. In the 1940s, he attended St Andrew's and Edinburgh Universities and subsequently started his own furniture manufacturing company in Sussex. By the early 1980s, he had become a highly successful businessman, but in 1982 he suffered complications during a major abdominal operation and effectively died on the operating table. The near death experience, with which he later came to terms, changed the course of his life radically and irrevocably.

He left behind the world of commerce and engaged a completely different outlook, with far-sighted goals and values. One aspect of this new life was to make him a household name, with an international reputation – it was his involvement with the niche world of dowsing.

Hamish joined the British Society of Dowsers in 1973, and rapidly became a stalwart member and regular lecturer. He was fulsome in his support for the organisation and was actively involved in its annual conferences right up to 2010.

Originally inspired by the equally legendary Fountain Group founder, Colin Bloy, and by the clairvoyant and healer Michael Colmer, Hamish made a series of groundbreaking dowsing discoveries during the 1980s and 1990s, which are described in his collaborative works, The Sun and the Serpent, The Dance of the Dragon and In Search of the Southern Serpent. These books captured the imagination of a whole new generation of practitioners.

In so doing, he played a significant role in bringing the arcane art out of its relative obscurity, and in presenting it to a wider, younger and more ambitious audience. Hamish realised the immense value in teaching others to dowse, both as a skill in its own right and as a means to exploring a portal on to a completely different way of looking at reality. He also produced a comprehensive beginners' guide to the subject, in 2002, entitled The Definitive Wee Book of Dowsing.

While Hamish is renowned across the globe for researching and lecturing on dowsing-related topics, he will also be remembered for two other important strands of a multi-faceted life.

Resulting from his changed world-view, Hamish engendered the formation, in 2006, of the Parallel Community – an organisation dedicated to linking together diverse groups and individuals in a number of countries that are seeking to build a more caring and a more positive future for mankind.

With over 1,000 members in several countries, Hamish regarded the establishment of this group as a significant step in translating his own practical experience of the world beyond the five gross senses into action in the here and now.

His other claim to fame was in realising his boyhood dream of becoming a blacksmith. He made both functional and sculptural ironwork to an exceptional standard, one example of which was presented to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Kiev. Hamish wrote a premature autobiography, It's Not Too Late, in the 1990s, but many of his more important revelations were yet to come.

A second volume, A Life Divined, describing his life and his discoveries largely in his own words, is due to be published later in 2010.

He was both a genial and generous figurehead and an incandescent inspiration for international communities of dowsers and activists. Hamish Miller had a head start on most of the rest of us in understanding the world beyond the five senses, in that he had not one, but three out-of-body experiences on which to draw. He was quite convinced that he knew what would happen after his eventual demise – because he had already been there.

In his own words he found the prospect of passing over as 'quite exciting', and that he was 'rather looking forward to it'. His final moments came, as he would have wished, at home in his adopted and beloved Cornwall, following a gentle and joyful Burns night with his wife, and fellow dowser, Ba.

Many of us would have wished him to have put off his next journey a little longer, but in hindsight we were very privileged to have enjoyed his presence for so long.