Ley lines

What it is

The claim that ancient sites — standing stones, barrows, hillforts, old churches, holy wells — fall along straight lines across the landscape, and that these alignments are meaningful.

There are two quite different versions, and conflating them makes the subject impossible to discuss.

The original version is archaeological and modest: that prehistoric people laid out straight trackways for navigation and trade, marked by features that remain visible.

The later version is metaphysical: that the lines are channels of earth energy, detectable by dowsing, concentrated at nodes where they cross, and connected to a global grid.

The second is what most people mean by "ley lines" today. It has nothing to do with what the man who coined the term proposed.

Where it came from

Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire brewer, photographer and amateur antiquarian, published The Old Straight Track in 1925 after noticing that features on a map appeared to align. He proposed that Neolithic Britain had been crossed by surveyed straight tracks — "leys" — marked by mounds, ponds, notches in hills, and later by churches built on older sacred sites. He imagined a class of surveyors, and thought the whole thing thoroughly practical. There is no energy in Watkins. He is discussed separately in Alfred Watkins.

Archaeologists rejected it fairly quickly, on grounds that have not changed.

The transformation came in 1969, when John Michell published The View Over Atlantis, which fused Watkins's alignments with Chinese lung mei or dragon lines, sacred geometry, UFO sightings and a lost universal science. This is the book that made ley lines a New Age subject, and essentially everything now believed about them dates from it rather than from Watkins.

How it is used

In practice: locating "power spots", planning pilgrimages along alignments, dowsing for lines and nodes, and siting ritual work at crossing points. Commercially, in maps, apps and tours.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the statistical objection is decisive, and it is worth understanding rather than just asserting. Given enough points scattered on a plane, straight-line alignments of three, four or five points occur in large numbers by chance alone. Britain contains many tens of thousands of eligible sites; with a generous corridor width and no constraint on which types of feature may be combined, alignments are not merely possible but mathematically guaranteed. The number found by ley hunters is not greater than the number chance predicts.

The most effective demonstration of this is comedic and completely fair. In 2010 the mathematician Matt Parker applied ley-line methodology to the locations of Woolworths stores in Britain and produced impressive alignments, including near-perfect geometric relationships — making the point that the method finds structure in any sufficiently dense set of points, including one indisputably laid out by twentieth-century retail planning.

We can say the method has a second, independent flaw: anachronism. Watkins allowed medieval churches to serve as markers of prehistoric lines, on the assumption that churches were built on older sacred sites. Sometimes they were. Very often they were not, and the assumption cannot be made in bulk without turning the exercise into one where any building of any age can be used to complete a line.

We can say no energy has ever been detected. Dowsing responses at claimed lines are explained by the ideomotor effect covered under dowsing, and instruments find nothing.

We can say — and should, because this is the part sceptical accounts usually skip — deliberate ancient alignments do exist and are real. Newgrange admits the solstice sun to its chamber. Stonehenge is built on the solstitial axis. Some Roman roads run famously straight. Several Andean and Mesoamerican sites are astronomically aligned to a high degree of precision. These are established by excavation and measurement, they are usually alignments to celestial events rather than to each other, and they demonstrate that ancient people were entirely capable of deliberate large-scale layout. Which makes the ley hypothesis a reasonable thing for Watkins to have wondered about in 1925, and an unreasonable thing to still believe in now.

We cannot say Watkins was foolish. He was doing amateur field science with the tools available and he published a testable claim, which is more than most of his successors managed.

Further reading

• Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track (1925) — the original, and much soberer than its reputation.
• Matt Parker's Woolworths alignment demonstration (2010) — short, funny, and a genuinely useful lesson in what chance produces.
• Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Ley Lines in Question (1983) — the careful archaeological treatment.