- published: 14 Apr 2010
- views: 32580
Ley lines are alleged alignments of a number of places of geographical and historical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths, natural ridge-tops and water-fords. Their existence was suggested in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, commenting "I knew nothing on June 30th last of what I now communicate, and had no theories".
Watkins later developed theories that these alignments were created for ease of overland trekking by line of sight navigation during neolithic times and had persisted in the landscape over millennia. In more recent times, the term ley lines has come to be associated with spiritual and mystical theories about land forms, including Chinese feng shui.
The concept of "ley lines" is generally thought of in relation to Alfred Watkins, although the stimulus and background for the concept is attributed to the English astronomer Norman Lockyer. On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire, and had been driving along a road near the village (which has now virtually disappeared). Attracted by the nearby archaeological investigation of a Roman camp, he stopped his car to compare the landscape on either side of the road with the marked features on his much used map. While gazing at the scene around him and consulting the map, he saw, in the words of his son, 'like a chain of fairy lights' a series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts and ancient churches on mounds. He realized immediately that the potential discovery had to be checked from higher ground when during a revelation he noticed that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. He subsequently coined the term "ley" at least partly because the lines passed through places whose names contained the syllable ley