Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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To assist this growing body of enthusiasts who were looking for their own ley lines in the landscape, in 1927, Watkins published The Ley Hunter's Manual. The Incas used "spirit-lines" or ceques with the Inca temple of the sun in Cuzco as their hub, marking the routes with wak’as, stone monuments that represent something revered. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. In 2005, Ruggles noted that "for the most part, ley lines represent an unhappy episode now consigned to history".

It is a theory that has long held interest for tan jones: "I've been interested in ley lines for years," they say. The Club survived him, although it became largely inactive at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and formally disbanded in 1948.It laid aside ideas of leys representing channels for earth energy, noting that this was beyond the realm of scientific verification, and instead focused on trying to build a case for ley lines that archaeologists could engage with. The two categories of people who won't benefit from either are the traditional archeologist who is sniffy about anything tainted by beliefs and the tribal mystic whose beliefs allow them to see whatever they want to.

They also demonstrated that ley hunters had often said that certain markers were Neolithic, and thus roughly contemporary with each other, when often they were of widely different dates, such as being Iron Age or medieval.

He also noted that the ley hunting community had "functioned as an indispensable training ground for a small but important group of non-academic scholars who have made a genuine contribution to the study of folklore and mythology. In his 1961 book Skyways and Landmarks, Tony Wedd published his idea that Watkins' leys were both real and served as ancient markers to guide alien spacecraft that were visiting Earth. Ley hunting welcomed those who had "a strong interest in the past but feel excluded from the narrow confines of orthodox academia". However, as Sullivan points out, the concept of 'ley lines' has been hijacked by the same 'mystical tribe' who see alien origins in crop circles and can infer a whole cultural certainty around the Druids and 'Paganism' from the few surviving fragments of Roman text.

The idea that ancient sacred sites might have been constructed in alignment with one another was proposed in 1846 by the Reverend Edward Duke, who observed that some prehistoric monuments and medieval churches aligned with each other. Looking back on the book's reception in 2000, Williamson noted that "archaeologists weren't particularly interested, and ley-line people were hostile". He also covers the fascinating, and creepy, paths of the dead used for centuries by churches when interring their dead. Watkins' ideas also influenced contemporary psychogeography, including Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat (1975), which in turn influenced Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor (1985).Ley hunters often differed on how they understood the ley lines; some believed that leys only marked a pre-existing energy current, whereas others thought that the leys helped to control and direct this energy. They were nevertheless generally in agreement that the ley lines were laid out between 5000 BCE and 2600 BCE, after the introduction of agriculture but before the introduction of metal in Britain. The book is considered the first book written about leys, and the first book to document and map alleged ley lines in Britain, primarily southern England. Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. His investigation convinced him that Britain was covered with a vast network of straight tracks, aligned with either the sun or the path of a star.

Born in 1855 into a well-to-do farming family, Watkins was also an amateur archaeologist; it was while out riding in 1921 that he looked out over the landscape and noticed what he later described as a grid of straight lines that stood out like "glowing wires all over the surface of the county", in which churches and standing stones, crossroads and burial mounds, moats and beacon hills, holy wells and old stone crosses, appeared to fall into perfect alignment. He presented this as a challenge to archaeologists, urging them to examine his ideas in detail and stating that he would donate a large sum of money to charity if they could disprove them. This, he argued, showed that the mere existence of such lines in a set of points does not prove that the lines are deliberate artefacts, especially since it is known that telephone boxes were not laid out in any such manner or with any such intention.

The author of these pages walked well over 3,000 miles across the hills of Scotland over a ten year period to understand the concept of ley lines, after watching a progamme on “Tomorrow’s World” on how to use a simple divining rod to pick up energies which are probably unknown to science.