Ley Line - Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track

Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track

The concept of "ley lines" originates with Alfred Watkins, though Watkins also drew on earlier ideas about alignments, in particular the work of the English astronomer Norman Lockyer, who argued that ancient alignments might be oriented to sunrise and sunset at solstices.

On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire, and had been driving along a road near the village (which has now virtually disappeared). Attracted by the nearby archaeological investigation of a Roman camp, he stopped his car to compare the landscape on either side of the road with the marked features on his much used map. While gazing at the scene around him and consulting the map, he saw, in the words of his son, "like a chain of fairy lights" a series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts, and ancient churches on mounds. He realized immediately that the potential discovery had to be checked from higher ground when during a revelation he noticed that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line.

He subsequently coined the term "ley" at least partly because the lines passed through places whose names contained the syllable ley, stating that philologists defined the word (spelled also as lay, lea, lee, or leigh) differently, but had misinterpreted it. He believed this was the ancient name for the trackways, preserved in the modern names. The ancient surveyors who supposedly made the lines were given the name "dodmen". Watkins believed that, in ancient times, when Britain was far more densely forested, the country was criss-crossed by a network of straight-line travel routes, with prominent features of the landscape being used as navigation points. This observation was made public at a meeting of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club of Hereford in September 1921.

His work referred to G. H. Piper's paper presented to the Woolhope Club in 1882, which noted that: "A line drawn from the Skirrid-fawr mountain northwards to Arthur's Stone would pass over the camp and southern most point of Hatterall Hill, Oldcastle, Longtown Castle, and Urishay and Snodhill castles." It has also been suggested that Watkins' speculation (he called it 'surmise') stemmed from reading an account in September 1870 by William Henry Black given to the British Archaeological Association in Hereford titled Boundaries and Landmarks, in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". He published his book Early British Trackways the following year, commenting "I knew nothing on June 30th last of what I now communicate, and had no theories".