Earth Energy: Ley Lines
Lines of sacred, hidden energy criss-crossing the globe,
impelling people to build their sacred sites along the corridors? Landing strips for Martians? Cosmic tram limes
provided power for UFOs to travel along their routes? Alfred Watkins, an amateur archeologist and photographer saw none
of these possibilities when he proposed the idea of ley lines in his book The Old Straight Track published in 1923.
The Initial Hypothesis
Watkins hit upon the idea that Britain’s ancient sites and traditional country landmarks were laid out along straight lines that criss-crossed the countryside while visiting the village of Blackwardine in his native Herefordshire in 1921. Among his "ancient sites" and "traditional country landmarks", Watkins included hilltops, churches, castles, standing stones, burial mounds, crossroads and wells. Through field work and the study of detailed ordinance maps, he reached the "ley line" conclusion, but he saw the lines as being practical, not mystical. For him ley lines were the quickest way between two points. They were prehistoric trade routes for transporting salt, flint, pottery and other goods. Along those well traveled routes, people began to build the necessities for travels and those who made their livings from the needs of travelers. Sacred sites in which to honor gods, wells to water thirsty traders, castles surrounded by fully functioning towns, etc sprang up in much the same way town, churches, graveyards, etc popped up along newly laid railroad tracks and highways across the US in the last two centuries.
Despite Watkins'
rational approach to his discovery, the archeological community was not receptive. At the time it was believed that
advanced ancient cultures only existed in the Near East and Aegean region, the people’s inhabiting the British Isles
were thought to have been incapable of creating such vast networks of lines, some stretching for miles over varying
terrains. It would be until almost fifty years later, in the late 1960s-early 1970s that the general accepted belief
began to be torn down. When The Old Straight Track was published, archeologists deemed Watkins’ conclusions
"preposterous" and Antiquity, the leading British archeology journal refused to run advertisements for the book.
Dr. Dan Robins, a research chemist at the Institute of Archeology, London University, decided to test some of the leys describe in Watkins’ book against ordinance maps and was surprised by the apparent precision of the lines. He followed up with fields work along the Welsh border and expanded the basic lines pointed in the book by finding new sites through which the leys seemed to extend. Dr. Robins was one of a few who, despite initial skepticism, attempted to test the proposed theory. Despite a few folks who were intrigued by the ley line theory, generally speaking Watkins original idea was dismissed and even laughed at by the academic community. Watkins recognized that his theory was difficult to prove, so instead he set about attempting to disprove it, he said:
On a map of Andover, Hampshire, South England, Watkins found 51 churches, he then attempted to connect the churches using straight lines. He found 8 lines connecting 4 churches and 1 line linking 5 churches. Could this be random? To test this very question, Watkins randomly dotted 51 points onto a piece of paper the same size as the amp of Andover and hten looked for lines connecting the points. He discovered 34 lines connecting 3 dots, 1 connecting 4 and 0 lines ran through 5 points. He concluded that the more sites situated along a line, the less likely it was to have occurred by happenstance.
The archeological community still took issue with Watkins proposal and some of their points were quite valid. For one thing, the markers tended to be from a wide range of time periods; many of the leys proposed in The Old Straight Track included sites constructed during the Stone and Iron Ages right along with medieval and post-medieval churches which made their relation to each other seem tenuous at best. Watkins countered that many sites were reused by later people and sites a quote from an edict by Pope Gregory:
This quote only harkened back to the time of the Anglo-Saxons and the reuse of sites is purely theoretical and cannot be proven in most cases without digging under existing churches or church ruins.
It was not only the time periods in which the included sites were built but also the varying types of sites that gave archeologists pause in accepting Watkins’ theory. Natural ponds and hills were included right along with henges, Iron Age forts, medieval castles, standing stones and wells were dotted along ley lines. The relationship between sites, therefore the likelihood that they were purposely aligned, was vague if plausible at all. With such staunch opposition, Watkins idea quickly died away only to be revived during the 1960s, though with a much different vision than Watkins had ever intended.
A New Generation and A New Perspective
In the 1960s, supernatural, paranormal and occult themes flourished and it was with such influences that a new generation took up the search for ley lines. Instead of being man-made practical trading routes, leys come to be viewed as lines of cosmic or earth energy that possessed healing occult powers that subconsciously called people to build along their tracks. They became tram lines that provided power to UFOs visiting from inner-stellar space. Not surprisingly, the established academic community scoffed at such out of this world proposals, but it was discoveries within the scientific community that would revive serious study of Watkins’ observations and conclusions.
Radio carbon dating, which allows archeologists to accurately date material found at sites, came into use during the 1950s. Aerial photography revealed the vast expanse of the Nazca lines of Peru and Bolivia first discovered in September 1936 and aerial photographs taken over the British Isles uncovered a greater number of henges, burial mounds and prehistoric earthworks than were previously thought to exist. These advances, combined with a less racist view of Stone Age humankind forces academics to realize that yes, the early inhabitants of the Isles did have the capability to build their monuments along an extended network of straight lines. Prehistorians began openly discussing and theorizing about “sacred landscapes” created by the purposeful arrangement of monuments. But questions remained. Did they do such a thing? and if so, what was the purpose?
In 1976, Paul Devereux took over as editor of the English magazine The Ley Hunter and applied a more scholarly approach to the study of ley lines. He began by cataloging previously published leys and soliciting readers to submit leys they had discovered during their own field work. He then began to filter out the weakest examples and after a few months of work reached the conclusion that “most of these lines were either very inaccurate or else used extremely questionable sites such as farms”. Many of the most famous leys were discarded, including the Saint Michael ley proposed by John Michell in his book The View Over Atlantis.
Michell’s first noticed that Burrowbridge Mump and Galstonbury Tar, both of which had medieval churches dedicated to St. Michael, could be linked by a straight line. After finding that the line could be extended to run through sites associated with St. Michael, dragons or St. George, the line became the longest ley in Southern Britain, running 400m from St. Michaels’ Mount at the tip of Cornwall to the abbey at Bury St. Edmonds. Near the middle of the line, where it runs through Burrowbridge Mump to the entrance of Avebury to the church at Ogbourne St. George, the line is extremely accurate. In either direction beyond these reaches, the line veers from straight to zig zag. Also of concern to Devereux in eliminating the ST. Michaels ley as an excellent example, is the preponderance of churches dedicated to St. Michael in Southern Britain. It would be akin to saying a ley exists connecting McDonalds. With so many in existence, there are bound to be some that are situated in a straight line and what are we to do with the many that fall outside the line?
After completing his map and field, Devereux concluded the leys with the greatest potential were short with at least five sites along them. For shorter lines, only 4 sites was acceptable. His new, more stringent requirements reduced the number of worthy leys from hundreds to 41. These were published along with Devereux’s conclusions in his book, The Ley Hunters Companion (1979).
Stringent Statisics
Using a formula developed by Michael Behrend, a mathematician from Cambridge University, Bob Forrest, another mathematician, analysed Devereux’s 41 “good” leys and reached the conclusion that “the idea that Britain is crisscrossed with leys is almost certainly false”. A few leys survived the statistical testing developed by Behrend and employed by Forrest. Seven out of the 41 leys proved to be statistically significant, the most notable of which were the Devil’s Arrow leys.
Devils Arrows is the name given to a
group of three Bronze Age standing stones near Borgoughbridge, Yorkshire. Standing 18-22 feet tall and weighting
30 tons. It is believed that there were once 5 stones in the grouping and legend has it that they are the arrows
that fell short of a local town that the devil attempted to destroy. They stand roughly in a straight line and form
the starting point for two interesting ley lines.
One line stretches five miles in a northwesterly direction and crosses Cana Henge, a barrow (burial mound) and the henge at Hutton Moor. The other runs through Numwick Henge and the three Thornborough Henges, covering a total of 11 miles. All sites along both lines are prehistoric, the henges were constructed during the late Neolithic period (3000-2500 BCE) while the barrow and the Devil’s Arrows themselves are from the succeeding Bronze Age.
Michael Behrend and Bob Forrest continued to apply statistical testing to leys through the 1980s. Further tests caused them to dispose of some of the leys that had passed earlier testing and even the Devil’s Arrow leys were called into question. Considering such results, it is not surprising to learn that they both began to loose interest in ley lines completely.
On the other hand, by 1994 Paul Devereux began to doubt statistics rather than leys. He thought that the strict, exacting standards set by the detail and précised nature of modern surveying equipment, aerial photography and ordinance maps might be too precise. How straight does a line need to be for us to say that it is straight? Some ancient sites are as large as 27 miles wide, Stonehenge itself is 2 miles wide, so questions arise: Do true ley lines need to be directly through the center of every monument they cross? If one or two sites are situated slightly to the right or left of a line, are they still considered to be on the line?
Ley Hunting Today
Devereux is no longer editor of The Ley Hunter, Danny Sullivan took over this position. Surprisingly, both men have made statements that shocked ley believers. Devereux currently recommends dropping the term “ley line” all together and in 1997 at a public lecture, Sullivan stated “there is no such thing as a ley line”. This does not mean that either man has abandoned their belief in and quest to prove the existence of sacred landscapes. Instead, they have modified their theories to reflect new developments and discoveries.
The discovery that led to the new developments in modern ley hunting occurred in 1723, almost three centuries ago. In that year, antiquarian William Stukeley notice an elongated rectangle formed by parallel embankments and ditches formed out of the land about ½ mile north of Stonehenge. Without a clue to its purpose, Stukeley named his discovery a cursus, the Latin word for racecourse simply because that is what it looked like, a Romano-British horseracing track.
Aerial photography has allowed for the mapping of more than
fifty additional cursus, some a few hundred yards in length, others extending a mile or more. Remains found in the
ditches date the formation of the cursus to the Neoithic period. Their exact purpose remains a mystery, though their
shape suggests that they may have been used for processionals. This theory is bolstered by burial mounds included along,
just out side or at the end of cursus. Professor Richard Bradley, an archeologist at Reading University, has suggested
that the Dorset Cursus, which includes two elongated barrows and has more barrows just outside the ends, was a prehistoric
Avenue of the Dead. The cursus discovered by William Stukeley near Stonehenge has burial mounds at both ends and seems
to be the end point of a ley line. This line, beginning at the axis of the north ditch and extending due east, passes
through Cuckoo Stone and Woodhenge. The ley was first noted by archeologist J.F.S. Stone in 1947 but questions remain as
to whether it was purposeful or accidental.
The cursus near Stonehenge is fairly straight, while others meander and many, such as the Dorset cursus, are giant crescent sculpted into the land. At Rudstone in Yorkshire, four cursus, none of them straight, converge. Their ends form a rough square around the tallest standing stone in Britain (25 feet). The stone now stands in a churchyard, marking the center point of ancient crossroads.
Archeologists, amateur antiquarians, geologists, ley hunters, ufo-ologists and average people bearing maps or dowsing rods continue the quest begun by Alfred Watkins almost a century ago. Today they hunt cursus as well as leys and have not abandoned the concept of an intentional placement of monuments and sacred sites. Their theories and technologies may be different, but their search is the same. There will probably never be enough evidence for one side to win another over, but that is never what it is about. It is a personal quest to understand earth and its energies and the ancestors who felt this very same need through centuries and ages long past.
Check out The Society of Ley Hunters
or check out the book that started it all…
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Article originally printed in
Quarters Pagan Journal.