Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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Iain Sinclair’s early poetry, especially the 1975 book Lud Heat, explicitly centres on the notion of ley lines under the urban landscape of London, complete with maps. This view was promoted to a wider audience in the books of John Michell, particularly his 1969 work The View Over Atlantis. During the Crieff cattle market era, which was wild, to say the least, criminals would be condemned to death on the Gallows, the word “kind” meaning that it was a long drop and a quick death. 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.

Ultimately, this compilation reminds readers how closely the act of creating art—written and visual—is linked to the art of listening. He also argued that humanity's materialism was driving it to self-destruction, but that this could be prevented by re-activating the ancient centres which would facilitate renewed contact with the aliens. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.The movement had a diverse base, consisting of individuals from different classes and of different political opinions: it contained adherents of both radical left and radical right ideologies. Below: Crieff’s Masonic Hall (ringed in red) has FIVE roof ridges, each one aligned to a sacred site: 4 stone circles, 2 standing stones; 3 burial cairns; 5 churches, one serpent motif; 1 castle; a Masonic Triptych and Fountain. Their existence, Watkins theorised, was the legacy of pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain who worked out, quite sensibly – during a time when the English landscape was dense with forest – that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and, being tougher than modern Britons, would tramp bravely through rivers and up hills to get to their destinations.

As part of their book, they examined the example of the West Penwith district that Michell had set out as a challenge to archaeologists during the previous decade. Watkins believed that the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex depicted a prehistoric " dodman" with his equipment for determining a ley line.Part of archaeologists' objections was their belief that prehistoric Britons would not have been sophisticated enough to produce such accurate measurements across the landscape. Being a practical man of the world, Watkins decided that these alignments represented ancient thoroughfares, routes along which goods such as salt, and craftsmen like flint knappers, traversed the countryside.

Both these hills appear to have been artificially shaped so that their axes align with each other, and their orientation, 27 degrees North-East can be read off a large Ordnance Survey sheet. In his 1961 book Skyways and Landmarks, Tony Wedd published his idea that Watkins' leys were both real and served as ancient markers to guide alien spacecraft that were visiting Earth. First published in 1925 THE OLD STRAIGHT TRACK remains the most important source for the study of ancient tracks or leys that criss-cross the British Isles- a fascinating system which was old when the Romans came to Britain. People may have done it simply because they wanted to, or based on their beliefs or astronomical alignments or a combination of these.He put forward his idea of ley lines in the 1922 book Early British Trackways and then again, in greater depth, in the 1925 book The Old Straight Track. Biography: Alfred Watkins was born in Hereford in 1855 and was an enthusiastic early photographer, the inventor of much apparatus, including the pinhole camera and the Watkins exposure meter. In this work, Williamson and Bellamy considered and tackled the evidence that ley lines proponents had amassed in support of their beliefs. A 130 paged book designed to run as a parallel piece to my moving image and image-installation To a line, to expand and explore the themes further. I thought it might show how things have developed since Alfred Watkin's book written 75 years previously.

The idea of "leys" as paths traversing the British landscape was developed by Alfred Watkins, a wealthy businessman and antiquarian who lived in Hereford.However, as Sullivan points out, the concept of 'ley lines' has been hijacked by the same 'mystical tribe' who see alien origins in crop circles and can infer a whole cultural certainty around the Druids and 'Paganism' from the few surviving fragments of Roman text. He proposed that an advanced ancient society that had once covered much of the world had established ley lines across the landscape to harness this lung mei energy. The water fountain in the centre emits healthy negative ions, which, presumably can be carried down that energy ley. Suddenly, ley lines became known not just for country walks and genteel treasure hunts but as routes into extraordinary, interplanetary worlds-between-worlds. First in the Herefordshire countryside, and later throughout Britain, Alfred Watkins noticed that beacon hills, mounds, earthworks, moats and old churches built on pagan sites seemed to fall in straight lines.