Alfred Watkins was driving across the hills near Blackwardine, in Herefordshire, when he looked out at the landscape and thought he saw a pattern. Ancient mounds, hilltop beacons, old churches, moats, and standing stones seemed to fall into dead-straight lines across the countryside. He went home and started ruling lines across his Ordnance Survey maps, and in 1925, the Hereford businessman published a book laying out his "theory."
Watkins called the lines "leys," after a word that kept turning up in place-names along them. His claim was modest and practical: these were the remains of prehistoric trade routes, sighted in straight runs from one landmark to the next. He even imagined the surveyors who laid them out, a guild he called "dodmen," and suggested the Long Man of Wilmington, a chalk figure on an English hillside, depicts one holding a pair of measuring staves.
Archaeologists wanted nothing to do with it. The straight-line routes ignored the realities of hilly terrain, the aligned sites came from wildly different centuries, and the editor O. G. S. Crawford refused to run advertisements for the book in his journal Antiquity. Later critics added the statistical kill shot: Britain is so thick with old sites that a line drawn almost anywhere will clip several of them by pure chance.
In 1961, Tony Wedd proposed that ley lines guided alien spacecraft, and John Michell's 1969 The View Over Atlantis recast them as channels of earth energy, tangled up with dowsing and numerology. The trade-route surveyor would not have recognized what his straight lines became.
