Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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According to his account, he was driving across the hills near Blackwardine, Herefordshire, when he looked across the landscape and observed the way that several features lined up together.

Michell's publications were accompanied by the launch of the Ley Hunter magazine and the appearance of a ley hunter community keen to identify ley lines across the British landscape. 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. He refused to publish an advert for The Old Straight Track in Antiquity, at which Watkins became very bitter towards him. Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. 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.

Though instead of being a book about my work it would act as an extension of the wider concerns found within, using other people’s viewpoints and through a different medium. Bel Jacobs explores the history and meaning of ley lines, and talks to the artist they have inspired.

In the lecture, delay becomes de-ley, meaning to be diverted from the straight path, and he finds himself explaining away places where a line clips the edge of a mound rather than running through its centre. There, Wilhelm Teudt had argued for the presence of linear alignments connecting various sites but suggested that they had a religious and astronomical function. 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. 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.

He proposed that the Long Man of Wilmington chalk geoglyph in Sussex was a depiction of such an individual with their measuring equipment. Michell wrote that his book would spawn "countless theories of occult Earth mysteries and New Age psycho-naturalism; stories of telluric lines of force that ran invisibly across countries, their routes marked above ground by megaliths and tumuli; the leys… would be folded into theories of psychic energies, magnetic fields, aliens and other forms of extra-terrestrial presence. By the 1990s, British archaeology had become more open to ideas about language and cognition, topics that Earth Mysteries enthusiasts had long been interested in.

Watkins' ideas also influenced contemporary psychogeography, including Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat (1975), which in turn influenced Peter Ackroyd's novel Hawksmoor (1985).He also covers the fascinating, and creepy, paths of the dead used for centuries by churches when interring their dead. The local Episcopal church (ringed, bottom) has its main roof ridge aligned to the corner stones of its burial ground and Mausoleum 2. Other statistical significance tests have shown that supposed ley-line alignments are no more significant than random occurrences and/or have been generated by selection effects. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more thoroughly investigated than in the British Isles where they have become known as Ley Lines. According to a review in The Geographical Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, Watkins sought to prove that "mounds, moats, beacons and markstones fall into strait tracks, i.