Ley lines are hypothetical alignments of a number of places of geographical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths. Their existence was suggested in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, in his book The Old Straight Track .
The existence of alignments between sites is easily demonstrated. However, the causes of these alignments are disputed. There are several major areas of interpretation:
- Archaeological: A new area of archaeological study, archaeogeodesy, examines geodesy as practiced in prehistoric time, and as evidenced by archaeological remains. One major aspect of modern geodesy is surveying. As interpreted by geodesy, the so-called ley lines can be the product of ancient surveying, property markings, or commonly travelled pathways. Numerous societies, ancient and modern, employ straight lines between points of use; archaeologists have documented these traditions. Modern surveying also results in placement of constructs in lines on the landscape. It is reasonable to expect human constructs and activity areas to reflect human use of lines.
- Cultural: Many cultures use straight lines across the landscape. In South America, such lines often are directed towards mountain peaks; the Nazca lines are a famous example of lengthy lines made by ancient cultures. Straight lines connect ancient pyramids in Mexico; today, modern roads built on the ancient roads deviate around the huge pyramids. The Chaco culture of Northwestern New Mexico cut stairs into sandstone cliffs to facilitate keeping roads straight.
- New Age: The ley lines and their intersection points are believed by David Cowan to resonate a special psychic or mystical energy.
- Skeptical: Skeptics of the existence of ley lines often classify them as pseudoscience. Such skeptics tend to doubt that ley lines were planned or made by ancient cultures, and argue that apparent ley lines can be readily explained without resorting to extraordinary or pseudoscientific ideas.
Alfred Watkins and The Old Straight Track
The concept of ley lines was first proposed by Alfred Watkins. On 30 June 1921, Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire, and went riding a horse near some hills in the vicinity of Bredwardine, when he noted that many of the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a straight line. He was studying a map when he noticed places in alignment. "The whole thing came to me in a flash", he later told his son.
However, in September 1870, William Henry Black gave to the British Archaeological Association, in Hereford, a talk titled Boundaries and Landmarks , in which he speculated that "Monuments exist marking grand geometrical lines which cover the whole of Western Europe". It is possible that Watkins's experience stemmed from faint memories of an account of that presentation.
Watkins believed that, in ancient times, when Britain had been far more densely forested, the country had been crisscrossed 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 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." The ancient surveyors who supposedly made the lines were given the name "dodmen".
Watkins published his ideas in the books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track . They generally met with skepticism from archaeologists, one of whom, O. G. S. Crawford, refused to accept advertisements for the latter book in the journal Antiquity . Most archaeologists since then have continued to reject Watkins's ideas.
In 2004, John Bruno Hare wrote:
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. His obsession with leys was a natural outgrowth of his interest in landscape photography and love of the British countryside. He was an intensely rational person with an active intellect, and I think he would be a bit disappointed with some of the fringe aspects of ley lines today".
Despite the mostly negative reception to his ideas, some experts have made observations similar to Watkins's. Megalithic researcher Alexander Thom offered a detailed analysis of megalithic alignments, proposing a standardization of measure by those who built megaliths, but avoided the term ley line . The discovery by Europeans of the Nazca lines, man-made lines on desert pavement in southern Peru, prompted study of their astronomical alignments.
The New Age approach: magical and holy lines
Watkins's theories have been adapted by later writers. Some of his ideas were taken up by the occultist Dion Fortune who featured them in her 1936 novel The Goat-footed God . Since then, ley lines have become the subject of a few magical and mystical theories.
Two British dowsers, Captain Robert Boothby and Reginald A. Smith of the British Museum, have linked the appearance of ley lines with underground streams and magnetic currents. Guy Underwood conducted various investigations and claimed that crossings of 'negative' water lines and positive aquastats explain why certain sites were chosen as holy. He found so many of these 'double lines' on sacred sites that he named them 'holy lines.'
Two German Nazi researchers Wilhelm Teudt and Josef Heinsch have also claimed that ancient Teutonic peoples contributed to the construction of a network of astronomical lines, called “Holy lines” (Heilige Linien), which could be mapped onto the geographical layout of ancient or sacred sites. Teudt located the Teutoburger Wald district in Lower Saxony, centered around the dramatic rock formation called Die Externsteine as the centre of Germany. Nazism often employed ideation of superiority and associated Aryan descent with ancient higher cultures, often without regard for archaeological or historic fact. See religious aspects of Nazism.
A skeptical approach: chance alignments
Some skeptics have suggested that ley lines do not exist, and are a product of human fancy. Watkins's discovery happened at a time when Ordnance Survey maps were being marketed for the leisure market, making them reasonably easy and cheap to obtain; this may have been a contributing factor to the popularity of ley line theories.
One suggestion is that, given the high density of historic and prehistoric sites in Britain and other parts of Europe, finding straight lines that "connect" sites (usually selected to make them "fit") is trivial, and may be easily ascribed to coincidence. The diagram to the right shows an example of lines that pass very near to a set of random points: for all practical purposes, they can be regarded as nearly "exact" alignments. Naturally, it is debated whether all ley lines can be accounted for in this way, or whether there are more such lines than would be expected by chance. (For a mathematical treatment of this topic, see alignments of random points.)
Archaeologist Richard Atkinson once demonstrated this point by taking the positions of telephone boxes and pointing out the existence of "telephone box leys". This, he thus argued, showed that the mere existence of such lines in a set of points does not prove that the lines are deliberate artifacts, especially since it is known that telephone boxes were not laid out in any such manner, and without any such intention.
Regarding the trade-route theories, skeptics point out that straight lines do not make ideal roads in all circumstances, particularly where they ignore topography and require users to march up and down hills or mountains, or to cross rivers at points where there is no portage or bridge.
Are alignments and ley lines the same thing?
The existence of the observed alignments is not controversial. Both believers in magical and ancient theories of ley lines and skeptics of these theories agree that these alignments exist between megaliths and ancient sites.
Most skeptics believe that their null hypothesis of ley-line-like alignments as due to random chance is consistent with the evidence. They believe that this consistency removes the need to explain the alignments in any other way. Some Chaos Magicians have views consistent with that approach, claiming it to be in accord with their generative view of chance. Still, others believe that further theories are needed to explain the observed evidence. See hypothesis testing, falsifiability and Occam's razor for more on these topics.
In discussing the arguments for and against the chance presence of ley alignments it is useful to define the term "alignment" precisely enough to reason about it. One precise definition that expresses the generally accepted meaning of Watkins's ley lines defines an alignment as:
Watkins remarked that if this is accepted as the degree of error, then:
One should also bear in mind that lines and points on a map cover wide areas on the ground. With 1:63360 (1-inch-to-the-mile) ma
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