Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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But at heart, this practical man of means insisted that ley lines were a crucial element of pre-Roman British trade, tentative first steps on the journey to the mercantile empire in which Watkins grew up. We also use them to help detect unauthorized access or activity that violate our terms of service, as well as to analyze site traffic and performance for our own site improvement efforts. Capacious’ is a word he is fond of, and his wide arc of collaborative inquiry into eternity, war, responsiveness and responsibility delivers an expansive one-pointedness.

There, Wilhelm Teudt had argued for the presence of linear alignments connecting various sites but suggested that they had a religious and astronomical function. The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones is a book by Alfred Watkins, first published in 1925, describing the existence of alleged ley lines in Great Britain. Watkins never attributed any supernatural significance to leys; he believed that they were simply pathways that had been used for trade or ceremonial purposes, very ancient in origin, possibly dating back to the Neolithic, certainly pre-Roman. In suggesting that prehistoric Britons were far more advanced in mathematics and astronomy than archaeologists had previously accepted, Thom's work was seen as giving additional credibility to the beliefs of ley hunters.One criticism of Watkins' ley line theory states that given the high density of historic and prehistoric sites in Britain and other parts of Europe, finding straight lines that "connect" sites is trivial and ascribable to coincidence.

Alfred Watkins was born in Hereford in 1855 and was an enthusiastic early photographer, the inventor of much apparatus, including the pinhole camera and the Watkins exposure meter. The authors, both 'alternative archaeologists', explore the theory of ley lines with the belief that lines and patterns formed by joining up ancient sites prove the existence of a megalithic science based on a mysterious force (oh dear! The archaeologist Richard Atkinson once demonstrated this by taking the positions of telephone booths and pointing out the existence of "telephone box leys". In this work, Williamson and Bellamy considered and tackled the evidence that ley lines proponents had amassed in support of their beliefs. However the edition that arrived was not the same as pictured therefore unsuitable for our collection.

You get a general feel of what a ley line is, sorry supposedly is, and where to find popular examples of them. 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.

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. Ley hunting welcomed those who had "a strong interest in the past but feel excluded from the narrow confines of orthodox academia". First discovered in ancient times by the legendary Alfred Watkins, who first coined the term, they have been rigorously studied over the last fifty years. It was in the latter decade of this period that a belief in ley lines was taken up by members of the counterculture, [13] where—in the words of the archaeologist Matthew Johnson—they were attributed with "sacred significance or mystical power". He came to this conclusion after comparing Watkins' ideas with those of the French ufologist Aimé Michel, who argued for the existence of "orthotenies", lines along which alien spacecraft travelled.This revised and updated edition of the classic study by Danny Sullivan is the most comprehensive guide to the subject ever published. 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. Watkins believed that the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex depicted a prehistoric " dodman" with his equipment for determining a ley line.