Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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He also observed the recurrence of "cole" and "dod" in English place-names, thus suggesting that the individuals who established these lines were referred to as a "coleman" or " dodman". Thus, the Irish have their fairy paths, now mainly tourist attractions dotted with picnic sites, and make believe grottoes, but many Chinese people still believe in "dragon lines" and feng shui. Taking his map to the top of the hill, he observed that other similar alignments lay all around him. Remembering [ley lines] exist is a way for us to find stillness and quiet, and to see the earth as animated. The archaeologist Richard Atkinson once demonstrated this by taking the positions of telephone booths and pointing out the existence of "telephone box leys".

It gives a detailed history of the subject from its Edwardian roots, through the hippy revival of the 1960s and 70s, to the rational and multidisciplinary approach of the late 1990s. I thought it might show how things have developed since Alfred Watkin's book written 75 years previously. One criticism of Watkins' ley line theory states that given the high density of historic and prehistoric sites in Britain and other parts of Europe, finding straight lines that "connect" sites is trivial and ascribable to coincidence. The paper by statistician Simon Broadbent [53] is one such example and the discussion after the article involving a large number of other statisticians demonstrates the high level of agreement that alignments have no significance compared to the null hypothesis of random locations. But in many ways, for the artist, the journey is ongoing, still sending out its tendrils between myth and history, past and present, the human and the more-than-human.Ultimately, this compilation reminds readers how closely the act of creating art—written and visual—is linked to the art of listening. In the lecture, delay becomes de-ley, meaning to be diverted from the straight path, and he finds himself explaining away places where a line clips the edge of a mound rather than running through its centre.

This revised and updated edition of the classic study by Danny Sullivan is the most comprehensive guide to the subject ever published. It wasn't until after the World War Two that the potential of the ley line as a repository for all things mystical really started to take hold. And with each twist and turn, it became ever more firmly enmeshed in a thicket of mysticism, neo-paganism and plain superstition.People may have done it simply because they wanted to, or based on their beliefs or astronomical alignments or a combination of these.

Many of Richard Long’s landscape works are clearly influenced by the ley line idea, as are the works of fellow landscape artist Hamish Fulton. They would be taken from the “Stayt” of crieff, along several straight roads aligned to the gallows, the jail and the Catholic church, all on ley lines. And Mitchell’s decision to place the tor at Glastonbury at the centre of his network, the capital of his sacred landscape, is still played out most summers on the Eavis family farm.Part of archaeologists' objections was their belief that prehistoric Britons would not have been sophisticated enough to produce such accurate measurements across the landscape. To assist this growing body of enthusiasts who were looking for their own ley lines in the landscape, in 1927, Watkins published The Ley Hunter's Manual. This revised and updated edition of the book by Danny Sullivan is the classic, comprehensive guide to the subject. I discovered The Old Straight Track in the mid-1970s, the era of the Stonehenge free festivals and a time when Watkins’ ley lines were the height of countercultural fashion. Independently of Watkins' ideas, a similar notion—that of Heilige Linien ('holy lines')—was raised in 1920s Germany.