Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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Since the 1960s, members of the Earth Mysteries movement and other esoteric traditions have commonly believed that such ley lines demarcate " earth energies" and serve as guides for alien spacecraft.

Now a new generation, including bones tan jones, are harking back to myth to explain the world around them; this time, in the context of a planet on the brink of collapse and a natural world, mourned as it disappears. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more thoroughly investigated than in the British Isles where they have become known as Ley Lines. Below: Lower Quoigs church, near Crieff, Scotland, has FIVE paths leading to ancient sites, including two logan stones, (probably rocking stones) both placed above the Highland Boundary Fault.This one started quietly when, on 30 June 1920, a respected businessman and photographer was visiting the Herefordshire village of Blackwardine, the site of a Roman settlement with the distinctly Celtic name of Black Caer Dun. As he glanced between the map and the landscape, Alfred Watkins — retired businessman, amateur antiquary and expert beekeeper; a photographer, baker and the inventor both of an exposure meter and a novel form of brown loaf — had something of an epiphany. Thom lent the idea of leys some support; in 1971 he stated the view that Neolithic British engineers would have been capable of surveying a straight line between two points that were otherwise not visible from each other. They also argued that in prehistory, as in the present, it was impractical to travel in a straight line across hilly or mountainous areas of Britain, rendering his leys unlikely as trade routes. The archaeologist Richard Atkinson once demonstrated this by taking the positions of telephone booths and pointing out the existence of "telephone box leys".

His obsession with leys was a natural outgrowth of his interest in landscape photography and love of the British countryside. Having read The Old Straight Track, I never felt the need to know any more about Ley Lines, that is until I came across this book by Danny Sullivan. From one perspective, the tale of ley-hunting is one of a classic modern religious movement, arising with an apocalyptic language which appropriated some of the tropes of evangelical Christianity, flourished for a brief time, and then subsided into a set of motifs and assumptions retained by a particular subculture of believers. I grew up in the countryside, connected to Earth energy, so it makes complete sense to me that there are energy lines moving through the Earth.Michell's publication was followed by an upsurge in ley hunting as enthusiasts travelled around the British landscape seeking to identify what they believed to be ley lines connecting various historic structures. Above: using divining rods to discover energies presently unknown to science like black spirals, which can cause ill-health from cancer to the dreadful necrotising fasc-iitis, the flesh-eating disease.

He put forward his idea of ley lines in the 1922 book Early British Trackways and then again, in greater depth, in the 1925 book The Old Straight Track.He was an intensely rational person with an active intellect, and I think he would be a bit disappointed with some of the fringe aspects of ley lines today. 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. One ley lines enthusiast, Philip Heselton, established the Ley Hunter magazine, [23] which launched in 1965. Many attempts have been made to understand and explain the extraordinary phenomenon of dead straight lines of prehistoric monuments, such as stone circles and standing stones, ancient and forgotten churches, wind-swept hill tops and stretches of antique trackways.