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Leylines – Fact or Fiction?
Created on Tuesday, 05 February 2013 10:51 | | 
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Leylines – Fact or Fiction?
For many ‘westerners’ seeking alternatives to traditional belief systems in this early part of the 21st century, the idea that planet Earth itself – Gaia - possesses tangible and usable mind- and health-enhancing powers is a strong attraction.
One such element that found considerable credence in the early and later parts of the last century, was that of ‘Ley Lines’: physical cross-country alignments of, for example, prehistoric and antique monuments, habitation sites, tracks, roads and churches; and/or natural landscape features, all of which echoed ancient belief systems. In 1921 such ‘Ley’ features in the English landscape were first suggested* as somehow being ‘linked’, by an amateur archaeologist, Alfred Watkins, in his book The Old Straight Track.
There isn’t room in this article to expand on Watkins’ ‘discovery’, and the subsequent interest – nay, ‘esoteric industry’ – which it generated. For the uninitiated however, reference to the website http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line will provide a more comprehensive starting point to whet the appetite. Suffice it to say that a ‘Ley Line’ has to ‘connect’ at least three significant landscape or historic ‘man-created’ features in a straight line. And unlike Watkins’ first observations in Herefordshire, where from a hill-top vantage point he could see what he took to be several such aligned features spread out before him - and not just straight Roman roads - landscape or man-made features forming a ‘ley line’ don’t have to be inter-visible on the ground.
In both the UK (and in continental Europe and America where the interest in the subject is just as strong and fiercely debated) it isn’t difficult to identify such ‘alignments’: simply peruse a UK OS 1:50,000 map, or (In France) an IGN 1:25,000 (or even 1: 1,500,000 Michelin) Carte – or deploy the ‘ruler’ tool on a Google Earth image.
But the BIG questions here are, “Are such ‘alignments’ anything other than coincidence?”; and “If so, do they have any significance for seekers of Earth mysteries and the answer to, as one may say, ‘Life, The Universe and Everything’?”
On the first query, over many years (and starting with Watkins himself, in 1925) numerous Ley Line researchers, mathematicians and statisticians – latterly aided by powerful computers - have calculated the ‘chances’ of three or more landscape features forming a ‘by design’ alignment#. In a nutshell, the statistical evidence indicates that, especially with such ‘alignments’ containing four or more points the chances of ‘alignment-by-design’ are ... nil !
But this is not to say that such ‘alignments’ are entirely accidental, or insignificant: Rationally, ‘alignments’ based only on landscape features – hill, crag or mountain tops, natural springs, cave entrances, etc - are highly unlikely to be deliberate. Not wishing to invoke the wrath of some divine hand, but having had a lifetime interest in Geology, I feel (reasonably) safe in suggesting that the Pyrenees for example is the product of ancient tectonic and orogenic processes and later glaciations, rather than the deft hand of Slartibartfast (although his speciality was designing sub-arctic fjords!).
On the other hand, what about those ‘Leys’ ‘defined’ by a succession of ancient sites – or ancient sites appropriated by later generations – located in a straight line? There is something truly compulsive about identifying a ‘Ley’ that takes in, across many kilometres, a succession of eg standing stones, dolmens, menhirs and trackways of truly prehistoric origin. Or more likely here in SW France, what we might term ‘successor sites’: Bronze/Iron Age settlements, Roman camps and roads, and early-to-medieval Christian churches and chapels: It has long been accepted that many pre-Christian sites were ‘adopted’ by the then ‘new’ religion. Here, the author has himself identified a five-feature alignment of such medieval sites, ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, over a distance of 50km!
Could it really be that from the earliest days of Homo Sapiens – at least in Europe – there developed a knowledge, an innate sense, that certain locations in the landscape were ‘propitious’ and should be marked as such; and moreover, that, even without the benefit of satellite imagery or the ability to fly, these early men (and women) had some sort of ‘power’ that enabled them to identify the most propitious ones: those sites which they somehow just knew – lay (no pun intended) in line across their (and still to us on the ground) topographically occluded, Neolithic (or even earlier?) landscape?
And if so, just how did they come to this ‘knowledge’? Clearly, without historic evidence to enable analysis in this our 21st century we can only speculate. Could, for example, millennia-old geometric and dot/line patterns on the walls of some of our caves hold hidden clues here? Yet one area of such speculation which has grown in credence in recent years is that ancient humans did possess just such an awareness; and that this enabled them to ‘tune in’ to what we might call ‘Planetary Energy’.
Which we in the ‘modern’ world lost track of as we moved in sophistication from hunter-gatherer to ‘urban settlement-builder’ societies – and so lost that direct contact with the ‘Gaia’ energy with which, say, meso- and neo-lithic man lived? And which increasing numbers of those now seeking a new age of personal ‘enlightenment’ see, in ‘Ley Lines’ and the possible ‘energy’ which they contain or radiate, as a possible reverse-contact source; at least in the sense of their hopefully regaining long-lost sensory powers as a means to achieving a more balanced and fulfilling ‘lifestyle’.
Which is perhaps one reason why, during the passage of the later 20th century, the notion of ‘Ley Lines’ became largely supplanted by that of ‘Telluric Energy Currents’. Aside from the idea which originated with Watkins and others of his period – i.e., that such alignments were remnants of ancient trackways, or originated with ancient sun, moon or stellar-worshipping cults (which, to be fair, they may well have done) - ‘advances’ in science and technology, especially the ability to detect miniscule geo-magnetic variations in the soil, now deployed in field archaeology, started to allow interested scientists to identify (and some claim, even amplify) electro-magnetic emanations from such ancient artefacts as standing stones; and from natural landscape features such as aquatic resurgences - ie, natural Springs; and piezo-electrically-charged exposed geological fault lines.
From this work a whole new science (some doubters may say, “quasi-science”) has gained currency, and a whole industry of ‘telluric energy identification and interpretation’ has developed. In industry it even competes with more traditional methods of ‘geomancy’ – e.g. dowsing using twigs or metal rods to locate underground water sources - a long established and even in the 21st century, reputable, geo-divination methodology.
To the author (who’s yet to be convinced!) such modern ‘Ley’ interpretation varies from the analysis of (expensive) magnetometer-produced menhir ‘radiations’ (and even cross-country between them, but not necessarily in straight lines!); through apparently simply human-sensed spiralling telluric emanations from natural springs; to hypotheses about negative effects of human exposure to such Energies – eg in connection with Sick Building Syndrome, sleep-disturbance, and even serious disease susceptibility. Yet even these may also have a logical, sound and scientific explanations?
With all this uncertainty, intellectual connections with belief systems based on, for example, Feng Shui, are inevitable. Which unfortunately tends in the author’s view to cloud the original issue: Do Ley Lines – and associated ‘Telluric Current’s - have any significance for seekers of ancient Earth mysteries and energies? Or is the Ley Line just a fancy Victorian notion, today aided and abetted by the ease with which one can so readily run a ‘ruler’ tool across any ‘Google Earth’ cross-country on-screen satellite imagery. Looking for medieval chateaux and churches all on the same ‘alignment’.
For the author, and with all due deference to the ‘already convinced’, the Jury’s still out!
* Although the notion had first been suggested as early as 1870 by another English Archaeologist, WH Black to a meeting of the British Archaeological Association.
# see http://www.boo.net/~jasonp/leyline.html
Footnote: The author is by no means an expert on this most complex subject, but hopes that the above thoughts may both assist and encourage readers who have come across it and are as confused as he has been! For further information/reading, just Google “LeyLines”: this produces “around 2,470,00 results in 0.40 seconds”. But not in a straight line!
© February 2013, John Midgley, 09000 Ariège, France
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