Ley lines? An old Guardian article explains:
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. He noticed that a straight line on the map he was carrying passed through a number of local landmarks: a croft, a hilltop, the site of a Roman camp, a straight stretch of lane. Taking his map to the top of the hill, he observed that other similar alignments lay all around him.
The man was Alfred Watkins, and the observation led initially to a lecture he delivered to the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in Hereford the following September, on the subject of what he had come to call ley lines, a network of straight alignments taking in cairns, standing stones (many of which had been converted to village crosses), mounds, camps, castles, ancient church sites, prominent stands of trees, hilltops and other high places.
Watkins believed his ley lines were ancient trackways, but he never convinced professional archaeologists that his work was of any value. So it was rarely thought of after his death in 1935. But in 1969 it was taken up by the counter culture, particularly John Michell in his The View Over Atlantis.
Michell transformed the lines, as the Guardian says, into "a sort of mystical national grid, lines of so-called earth energy linking the great religious sites of prehistoric Britain". This did nothing to impress another generation of archaeologists, but it did make the concept popular again for a while.
I suppose the killer question for a sceptic to ask is whether ancient sites lie along straight lines any more than you would expect from a random scatter of points on a map.
All that admitted, as this video says, following a supposed ley line - this one just happens to be in Shropshire - is a great way of exploring the countryside. It reminds me of John Rogers' walks following the course of lost London rivers and what he says about them taking him to parts of the city he wouldn't otherwise visit.
Ley Lines in the mystical sense appear as a plot device in Alan Garners "Moon of Gomrath" published in 1963 so the idea must have been around before that ?
ReplyDeleteRef Jonathan's question in his penultimate paragraph.
ReplyDeleteIn the early 1980's I was a young keen History teacher in Derbyshire and a keen walker in the Derbyshire Peak District. Having read an article about the mystical power channeled by ancient ley lines in Derbyshire, I duly got out the relevant OS map and plotted these ruler straight lines joining up various ancient sites.
The Ley lines as depicted actually existed! As long as you ignored dozens of other equally ancient sites that scattered the map to left and right of the ruler and which would obliterate the nice straight lines if you joined them all up.
Over four decades later I am still a keen historian and a keen walker. At my age though I could sometimes do with a shot of energy from the, non existent, ley lines.