The ley of the land

Are they ancient tracks linking burial mounds and holy places, the flightpaths of UFOs, sources of energy - or just a complete fallacy? Ley lines have been debunked, demystified, resurrected. What is the truth? David Newnham follows the trail

The holy well is a complete surprise. Magical, astonishing - like suddenly finding your own name inscribed on a monument you have never visited. Neither of us had the least idea that it would be here until we almost fell headfirst into it. Which goes to show that those Edwardians in their galoshes and charabancs were absolutely right. There's more to this game than holding rulers to maps. You have to get out and walk.

Lionel Stanbrook needs no persuading. See him trudge the Sussex downs with kids and dogs and weekend wellies, and you see a happy man. Happy to soak up his beloved English landscape. Happier still to let the stresses and strains of the advertising business blow to the four winds.

Not that we are in Sussex today, for Lionel has brought me to Herefordshire, the mysterious border county strewn with the hummocks and humps and stumps of wayside crosses that speak of human habitation over countless millennia. And nor are we here for an idle stroll, but rather to ramble with purpose. For Lionel senses a pattern among these apparently random landscape features, and he wants me to be there when he runs it to ground.

See that stone in the meadow, he tells me, and with your eye track a roadway from the Iron Age fort. And now from the wall that skirts this Lord's half acre, see a second church beyond and, in alignment behind it, another. A path once passed this way, he says, ascending perhaps to the ridge of that hill. And a break in the hedge betrays the ghost of another, do you think? But not even he can be sure.

It is the third church in the line that catches us unawares. We are startled by a woman priest who appears without warning, but more so by what she says to us. "Have you seen our well?" she asks, then ushers us into a carpeted room that opens off the nave. A wooden lid covers the narrow shaft, and she raises it to show us the water below. "It is St Ethelbert's well," she says. "But its origins are pre-Christian."

As she talks about Offa, of Mercia and the Marches, it becomes apparent that Lionel and I have each taken the same vow of silence. We will ask the priest about the well, take a leaflet, drop loud coins into the box. But as to its peculiar significance for us this afternoon, not a word will we breathe. "A ley line?" she would say. "You're looking for a ley line? Silly boys."

She might not, of course. Everyone's heard of ley lines these days. And, while they might not know what one is, they're more than happy to accept that such things exist.

"Ley lines may hold key to sick building," said a newspaper headline recently. Quite matter-of-fact, it was. Armed with copper "dowsing rods", an expert had inspected a council building whose occupants had suffered an unusually high incidence of illness. It was, said the dowser, the worst case of "negative earth energy lines, or ley lines", running through a building that he had ever come across. "If they are negative or 'black' lines," he explained, "they drain a person's energy, leading to illness." While the dowser recovered from his ordeal, the council was "evaluating" his report. "We cannot dismiss this man's findings out of hand," said a spokesman.

The existence of ley lines seemed not to be in question - only whether they were to blame in this particular case. As I read the story, I couldn't help wondering how a mere pipedream, conjured out of the air one summer's day less than three years after the Great War, had survived beyond the end of the most technological of centuries. One thing was certain: the dreamer would be hard-pressed to recognise his progeny. He might even have trouble recognising himself.

Alfred Watkins, an American magazine article proclaimed recently, was "a British mystic" who discovered the earth's "energy bands" in the 20s. A more accurate description would have been: a pillar of county town society, businessman, local councillor and inventor of the photographic light meter. Watkins was born in 1855 into a well-to-do Herefordshire farming family. His father had brewing, hotel and milling interests, and Alfred developed a popular brown loaf, which he called the Vagos, the Roman name for the River Wye. His daytime job of visiting the brewery's clients meant that he had a detailed knowledge of the Welsh border country. And when not working for the brewery, he took photographs - especially landscape photographs - with a simple camera that he'd made out of a cigar box.

Watkins was a pioneering photographer, and wrote a number of popular manuals on the subject. He was also a businessman, a beekeeper, an archaeologist, a naturalist and an antiquarian. Somehow, this solid, practical, family man even found time to serve on the local council and to campaign for the Liberal cause (he organised a series of impressive lantern-slide lectures). And then came the ley lines.

On the last day of June 1921, Watkins visited a friend in Blackwardine, near Leominster, and like any self-respecting antiquarian, he scanned the locality for features of interest. Suddenly, it struck him that a number of these features appeared to form a straight line. When he took a ruler to his map, it was indeed true. In fact, all across the countryside, churches and standing stones, crossroads and burial mounds, moats and beacon hills, holy wells and old stone crosses, fell into perfect alignment. It was, as he described it later, a moment of revelation.

Watkins attributed neither mystical nor electrical properties to these alignments. Rather, he felt certain that they were the visible remains of a prehistoric system of tracks or trading routes, and he was to devote the last 14 years of his life to refining this theory. Characteristically, he used a slide show to tell the world about his discovery, and in 1922 he worked it up into a book called Early British Trackways. Then, in 1925, came the publication on which his fame now rests. More popular even than the Watkins photographic manuals, The Old Straight Track remains in print to this day. And deservedly so. For nobody who loves the countryside, and who also has a taste for mystery and history, can fail to be charmed by this book.

Watkins argued that, long before the Romans built their paved military roads, the inhabitants of Britain were aware that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and accordingly set about surveying a system of unsurfaced paths that enabled them to travel efficiently about the country. These routes, he reckoned, were set out visually - by lighting beacons on high points, for example - and then lining up markers across the intervening land. Once surveyed, the paths would have been indicated at key points with boulders, or with mounds or clumps of trees, or with notches cut into prominent ridges or with ponds whose water, reflecting the light of the sky, would be visible for miles.

And now we come to the beautiful part of the argument. For Watkins maintained that, although these insubstantial trackways had been lost over countless centuries, many of their mark points survive, handed down to us in the guise of all those features that first caught his antiquarian's eye on the Ordnance Survey map. For the original intersections and way-marks gradually became meeting places and markets. Long after their original purpose was forgotten, individual marker stones acquired local significance, becoming obvious sites for burial mounds or for pagan temples, many of which were subsequently converted into Christian churches.

Thus it is, says The Old Straight Track, that features that may have been constructed thousands of years apart - a late medieval church, say, and a Bronze Age long barrow - can be linked into a common system of alignments, which, in turn, could be seen to pivot on fixed points such as hilltops.

Throughout the book, it is the details that charm and entice the reader. For once Watkins got the bit between his teeth, he didn't rest until he had almost chewed through it. His choice of the word "ley" is explained in great detail, deriving from a word that means a clearing, pasture or field. And from "ley" he moves on to other words associated with the straight tracks, with the people who made them and with the goods that were carried along them, and argues that echoes of these words may be detected today in our common place names. A farm called Hillend, for instance, suggests the end of a track sighted on a hill point, and any number of Bradleys, Bradlows, Broadways and Bredenburys are called upon to give evidence of "broad tracks". Surmising that the surveyors of old must have been a special class of men with names denoting their rank and occupation, Watkins dwells at length on the frequent recurrence of the elements "col", "cole" and "cold" in English place names. King Cole, he concludes, was a surveyor-in-chief, probably responsible for firing up those hilltop beacons. The most memorable - and fanciful - of these philological ramblings concerns the Dodman.

Now "Dod" and its derivatives, says Watkins, are found everywhere: in Doddingtree, Dodderhill, Dodesley and Doddington - even, if you look hard enough, in Deadman's Acre and Deadman's Hole. Which leads him to conclude that the ancient surveyor who, in time-honoured fashion, sighted straight lines with the aid of two wooden staves, was known as the Dod-man. Why? Well, says Watkins, "there is an old name for a snail, quoted by Dickens in David Copperfield. 'I am a regular Dodman, I am,' said Mr Peggotty, by which he meant snail." Watkins describes how the link came to him. "The sight of a snail out for a walk one warm, moist morning solved the problem," he says. "He carries on his head the dod-man's implements, the two sighting staves."

How did the starched world of the 20s react to all this talk of snails and tracks and sighting ponds? By and large, the archaeological establishment was dismissive. Until the 60s - when Professor Alexander Thom made detailed measurements of stone circles, from which he concluded that prehistoric societies had considerable knowledge of mathematics, geometry and astronomy - it was considered that the ancient Britons were a primitive bunch, incapable of the surveying feats for which The Old Straight Track gave them credit.

But among amateurs, Watkins's theories were warmly received. The Old Straight Track Club was set up (Watkins was president), and also The Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club, a sort of lugubrious precursor of the internet, whose 40 members circulated news of local discoveries with the aid of gummed stickers, postcards and printed notepaper. In 1927, Watkins published The Ley Hunter's Manual, setting out the "rules" of the game (only alignments of four or more points were considered significant; verification, preferably by walking a line, was essential, and so on).

Whatever the establishment thought (and there were a few professional archaeologists in The Old Straight Track Club), lay-people were eager to become ley people. After all, anybody could do it, weather permitting. All it took was a map, a ruler and a reasonably sharp pencil, a pair of serviceable walking shoes and a free Sunday. What better way to have an open-air adventure? What better excuse for a country ramble? What happier way to discover the real truth about our past? The long summer of ley hunting endured until 1939. And then another world war, even more bloody than the first, made the present seem suddenly more pressing than the past.

Lionel is in his London office, a gruelling train ride away from the hills and meadows of his weekend rambles. But his commitment to the true cause of ley-hunting shines as brightly as it did on the day we stumbled together upon St Ethelbert's Well. "What we have to do," he says, "is drag the subject back from the excesses of intellectual hippydom. Frankly, I'm pissed off with the way it's been marginalised for so many years. The whole topic of ley lines has become like a less interesting edition of The X-Files."

He is talking about the copper rods - the rods and the crystals and the positive and negative energy and the whole baggage of electro-magnetic mumbo jumbo that somehow attached itself to The Old Straight Track, so that it now tints the glass through which all but the purest purist views the original thesis. Where did it come from, all this mystical paraphernalia?

After 20 years of silence, it was a squadron of UFOs that flew to the rescue of Watkins's forgotten ley lines, although today, Lionel Stanbrook is not alone in believing that these extra-terrestrials did the cause of The Old Straight Track nothing but harm. In the late 50s, Aimé Michel plotted French UFO sightings on a map and claimed (his findings were later dismissed by "ufologists") that many fell in straight lines. In 1961, Michel's observations were combined with English ley-line theory in a book called Skyways And Landmarks. Its author, ex-RAF pilot Tony Wedd, argued that, if UFOs were flying along leys, it must be because the lines were useful as navigation aids. Was this a visual thing, or were the spacecraft picking up on some sort of magnetism? And if the latter, then were ley lines not trading routes, after all, but some form of electrical energy? It was like a Saturn rocket, and it propelled the entire subject out of the post-Edwardian world of galoshes and charabancs and rural rambles, straight into the Age of Aquarius. In 1962, the Ley Hunters Club was set up by a bunch of flying-saucer spotters, and before long the movement had its own magazine, The Ley Hunter.

Across the great divide, in the world of orthodox archaeology, things were moving, too. In one of those general revisions of time-scales that ancient history undergoes periodically, it was decided that western European monuments such as Stonehenge were older than had been imagined, and therefore had been built independently of eastern civilisations, by people who were clearly more advanced than had been supposed. Add to this the claims by Alexander Thom and others that some megalithic monuments in Britain and France were aligned to objects visible in the night sky, and it was only a matter of time before the term "golden age" was heard in the land.

And what an age it was. Many and varied were the powers attributed to the nature-loving inhabitants of neolithic Britain by those whose imaginations were fuelled by a little learning and a great deal of disillusionment with modern times. The ancients, it was said - indeed, still is said in some quarters - were able to sense the presence of ley lines, redirect them, intensify them, store them and, ultimately, harness their power. All this they achieved with their cunningly-placed mounds and stones. And once they had the earth's power at their disposal, they used it to achieve such wonders as multiple harvests, heightened mental states, levitation (of those 40-ton megaliths, for example) and inter-planetary travel. All of which made the despised 20th century seem a pretty grubby place.

Throughout the 60s and 70s, ley-line theory was to mutate and bifurcate, to bend with every passing fad, so that it frequently seemed as though its only purpose was to highlight the failings of our own times. And with each twist and turn, it became ever more firmly enmeshed in a thicket of mysticism, neo-paganism and plain superstition. By 1983, the entire edifice seemed ripe for demolition. And what better way to demolish a structure than by blasting away its foundations?

I still treasure my copy of The Old Straight Track. My father bought it for me, and wrote in the front: "To David with love, Christmas 1979." For some years, Watkins was to inform my every excursion into the countryside. I would slow down on passing gaps in ancient field walls. I would keep an eye open for old milestones and I would linger over fords. Then, one day, I stumbled on a book by two young academics, and the spell was broken.

Ley Lines In Question is out of print. But its joint authors, Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, are still very much together - "We are the first couple with PhDs from Jesus College, Cambridge, ever to have offspring". I track down Williamson at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches and studies the development of the landscape, and ask him to describe how he and his future wife satisfied themselves - and me - that Watkins was wrong. "Good God!" he says. "It all comes flooding back. All those wasted afternoons."

What the couple did was take head-on the basic premise that a collection of ancient sites fall in straight lines more often than chance would predict. "The evidence for this is supposed to be that a number of dots randomly spread across a bit of paper the size of an Ordnance Survey map line up less often than the same number of ancient sites on the map," says Williamson. "And that is true. I will admit it. However, it is an unfair comparison for two reasons.

"The first is that an awful lot of the things used as mark points on ley lines are not dots. Maiden Castle, for example, isn't a dot. It's a large area. And the more you increase the size, the more its alignability increases. The second thing, which is more subtle, is that the ancient sites are not randomly distributed across the map. They are patterned and structured as the result of very complicated processes. For example, you tend to get clusters of round barrows along chalk escarpments, in part because there always were more on those light soils, but in part because they have been destroyed more in other places by farming. River valleys are roughly linear and they may have villages strung along them, like beads on a thread. So the churches within the villages will already be approximating more to a straight line than you would expect by chance. And so on.

"Now, it's impossible to simulate those structuring principles because they are so complex. So we did something quite easy, if excruciatingly boring. We took the map for the land around Avebury and went through every single ley marker and connected it up to every single other ley marker until the map was covered in lines, and we kept a score of the number of points there were in each alignment." He digs out a copy of his old book and turns up the results. "They were quite impressive. We found 130 alignments of six points, 44 of seven, 14 of eight and five of nine."

It seemed to endorse Alfred Watkins's original proposition. But then the pair repeated the exercise, only with one crucial difference. This time, they randomised the positions of each of the features within each grid square on the map - just drew it in where the fancy took them, while keeping it within roughly the same area. This meant that the broad distribution of points across the entire map still mirrored reality, but the relationship between any one point and any of the others was now arbitrary.

"We then went through the whole bloody palaver again, and found 127 six-point alignments, 48 of seven, 12 of eight, and six of nine. In other words, the score on the simulated, randomised map was slightly better than on the original. That doesn't in itself disprove the existence of ley lines. But it disproves the original proposition that if you simply take old stuff on Ordnance Survey maps, it falls into alignment more than chance would predict. It doesn't."

Having exposed the statistical fallacy at the heart of ley-line theory, Williamson and Bellamy went on to pre-empt the most likely response - namely that ley lines would originally have been clear in the landscape, but a lot of the marker points have been destroyed. They took a map of south Cambridgeshire, an area which Watkins himself had studied in detail, and drew on it all the alignments he had recorded, plus a few he had missed.

"Then we went to the Cambridge aerial photography library and plotted on the map the positions of all the ring ditches, which are little circular crop marks left by ploughed-out round barrows. These can't be seen from the ground. So, in ley-hunters' terms, we were recovering lots of mark points that had been lost. One would assume that if the lines drawn by Watkins and others were in any sense real and meaningful, then a significant proportion of these rediscovered points would plot neatly on to the lines. But none did. Not one."

The pair have long since turned their backs on ley lines. "After the book came out, I had a sense of knocking my head against a brick wall," says Williamson. "Archaeologists weren't particularly interested, and ley-line people were hostile." But while they clearly failed to stop Watkins in his tracks, so to speak, the thorough mauling to which they subjected his theories may have had a sobering effect on the more sophisticated among his latterday followers. As I prepare to leave, the retired ley-buster has a wicked smile on his face. "So tell me the latest news," Williamson says. "Are ley lines still straight?"

In later years, even Alfred Watkins was beginning to bend. While his belief in the existence of definite lines in the landscape remained firm, he was increasingly prepared to accept that, in some instances - where two leys ran close together, for instance - his trade-route theory made little sense. But if not ancient paths, then what?

Agroup of large cardboard boxes, each with a sturdy lid containing three air holes, has been taken out of storage by staff at Hereford library, and Lionel Stanbrook is poring over their contents. With him are Danny Sullivan, an architect and former editor of The Ley Hunter journal, and Danny's wife, Jo. They have been coming here for weeks, sifting through the buff envelopes and "Snap" files ("Quality No 1") that contain the annals of The Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club, and every session brings new fresh insights into the minds of the early ley-hunters.

Among the quaint reports of "lantern lectures", of summer outings ("bring a field glass") and of open-air rallies at which men in plus-fours would enlist the help of entire scout troups, there is evidence that the early ley-hunters, in Sullivan's words, "excelled themselves with lateral thinking".

One correspondent, for instance, notes that in Korea the twisting and turning of native roads is explained by the belief that evil spirits travel only in straight lines. Watkins himself responds to this observation, suggesting that Christian churches in the British Isles might have been built on straight lines precisely in order to block the passage of evil. Briefly, it seems, religion and the rituals associated with death were seen as possible alternative explanations for leys.

Seventy years later, this possibility was taken up by Paul Devereux and Nigel Pennick in their 1989 book, Lines On The Landscape. Pulling in evidence from around the world, Devereux was subsequently to lay the foundations for an entirely new approach to ley-hunting - an approach that Danny Sullivan now believes is more feasible than anything proposed by Watkins, and sufficiently rooted in fact to sidestep even the fundamental objections raised by the Williamsons.

"The Ley Lines In Question argument is a bit old hat these days," he says. "Most of it I would tend to agree with. Back in those days, the whole thing was quite easy to deal with because it was conducted on a very amateurish basis. But what Paul Devereux's work has done is drag the subject out of that backwater of stupidity and into a far more interesting arena. We are talking to archaeologists and anthropologists now, and considering ways in which human consciousness itself relates to landscape."

There is, says Sullivan, no single phenomenon that is a ley. "There are lots of different things - old tracks, alignments between sites, astronomical alignments, and so on - which could all come under the ley lines umbrella. Watkins, at the end, was saying that there were different classes of alignments. What was he really seeing?"

The more convincing alignments, Sullivan believes, were probably corpse ways or funeral paths. These designated paths by which the dead were carried to their place of burial have been documented all over Europe, frequently showing up on medieval maps and sometimes surviving into this century in the form of local folklore. Some were deliberately crooked - in order, perhaps, that the spirit of the deceased might not return to haunt the living. But others were straight, and clearly sighted on the towers of churches.

"In China," says Sullivan, "evil spirits were thought to travel in straight lines, so the route had to be blocked with a wall containing a charm. In Ireland, 'fairy passes' ran between places of ancient sanctity. In Bolivia, straight lines run from hilltops, where spirits were thought to live, directly into towns and churches. In South America and the south-west US, where these things are still on the ground, they conform uncannily to Watkins's original ideas. Yet they are on another continent and belong to a completely different culture, which suggests that there's something going on that is universal."

The common thread, it seems, is the widespread belief that spirits, ghosts and fairies all travel in straight lines - a notion that Devereux thinks might derive from the sensations experienced in all places and at all times by humans in those altered states of consciousness known to be induced by shamanic rituals or the use of hallucinogens.

Shamanism? Hallucinogens? At first glance, it's a far cry from the stiff-collared, sepia world of Alfred Watkins. And yet there's another common thread running through all of this - a thread that links the first ley-hunters with their most modern counterparts. I refer not to any out-of-body experience, but to the simple out-of-car experience that Lionel Stanbrook describes.

"It can be left to a coterie of hardened intellectuals to discuss the whys and wherefores of shamanism or whatever," he says. "But for me, it's about getting people off the sofa and into the open air. It's about being excited by our own heritage and about climbing to the tops of hills and admiring the view with a sense of adventure and of mystery and imagination."

Ley Lines - A Comprehensive Guide To Alignments, by Danny Sullivan, is published by Piatkus Books, priced £16.99. For details about the Society Of Ley Hunters, which was due to hold its inaugural meeting in Hassocks, West Sussex, last Saturday, write to PO Box 1634, Hassocks BN6 8BZ.

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