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Ley Lines

Coal said:
Alfred Watkins original book actually proposed a series of tracks, that is actual roads, rather than mystical energy lines. Inasmuch that there was an iron-age road or trail system, it was a decent enough guess.
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True enough. But it was the first book to propose the idea of "ley" lines, and document them.
 
Coal said:
I kind of feel his ideas were hijacked in the same way Roswell was hijacked and mystified in the 1970s.
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Yes, I'd agree. But...as I said - he was the first to propose the concept of "ley lines" as ancient mystical lines of energy. That's in writing.
 
Coastaljames said:
Yes, I'd agree. But...as I said - he was the first to propose the concept of "ley lines" as ancient mystical lines of energy. That's in writing.
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"The Ley Hunters Manual" has nothing about 'mystical lines of energy' in it. Does he propose that in one of his other books?
 
Coal said:
"The Ley Hunters Manual" has nothing about 'mystical lines of energy' in it. Does he propose that in one of his other books?
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Yes, in "The Old Straight Track", published 1925.
 
Coastaljames said:
Yes, I'd agree. But...as I said - he was the first to propose the concept of "ley lines" as ancient mystical lines of energy. That's in writing.
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Where in Watkins' books did he ever attribute energy transmission / flow to ley lines?

It's been 30 years (and more) since I read Watkins' books, and I don't recall any such claims. My readings at the time left me with the clear conclusion the energy flow (etc.) angle didn't get appended to Watkins' work until (e.g.) John Michell cross-linked it to (e.g.) feng shui.
 
I may well be wrong and you may well be right! And there may be a certain semantics at play. It's been nigh on 30 years since I read it myself! Cheers.
 
This map shows some of the Alesia/Alaise variant place name alignments extending well beyond France.
The speculation is that the name derives from the proto-indo-european word alès, meaning a meeting place.

PSX_20180911_115043.jpg
 
If we assume leylines exist (and where's the evidence?) how wide are they? A few tens of yards makes all the difference. Many leylines look quite impressive on an OS map, with four, five, six or more appropriate markers all seemingly along the pencil line. Until you examine the 'alignment' on Google Earth...
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
The "hub" of all the alignments is the very ancient town of Alaise. An earlier spelling was Alèse.
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Well, Alèse couldn't be a town : it's the name of a cover we use over the bed. Alès is a town in Cevénnes, in Département du Gard, remarkable for being.... unremarkable. There is very few about its history during Roman times (it's considered as an oppidium, so a small town in the main Roman roads) or Middle Ages. It was a Protestant fortress during the Religious Wars and it suffered a siege because of it. Otherwise, nothing that seems specially energetic.

I'm familiar with the Louvre/Tuilleries axe and La Défense and I can attest that the energies there are kinda palpable on this places. But, then again, it is, as much as, on other places in the Parisian region, not necessarily over the same axe.

I suspect that ley lines alone can't be the only source of what "energises" a place, a town, a monument.

By the way, the lines over the map made me think almost immediately of the vintage Orthotenies, proposed by Jacques Valée for proving statistically the reality of UFO sightings. Interesting how some patterns keep coming back...
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
There are claims of Europe-spanning leys, originating in France, with alignments of some 400 place names which are variations of the ancient Celto-Gallic name Alesia/Alaise...
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I recently bought Graham Robb's book, The Ancient Paths. I picked it up as part of a three for two offer and really hadn't thoroughly taken on board what it was about. I kind of gave up on things joining up in straight lines at about the same time I did on Top Trumps, and, to be honest, I think I may well have walked away had I known a bit more - but I'm glad I picked it up because, even if it turns out to be complete bobbins, it's a really interesting read.

It gets great reviews from some very respectable, albeit non-specialist, sources - however, archaeologists and historians are notably absent.
 
Coal said:
How do such alignments take account of the earth's curvature?
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Again, if you read the article, he touches on the significance of the Earth's circumference. As, however, these alignments are parts of a great circle route, the Earth's curvature has no more bearing than it does for the line of the equator.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Again, if you read the article,
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Point taken :hoff:...

...I've read it.

It's an impressive set of unsupported assertions and non-sequiturs. I really don't see anything there which makes sense or is supported by empirical reasoning.
:hoff:
 
[Minor edits: correcting open/closed quotes for clarity. No changes to the wording.]

I remember falling victim to the ley hunting bug as a teenager and again in my 20s. I was excited to "discover" that Southwell Minster (near to where I live) is "on a ley line".

However...

The original idea of the ley line was no more than "the old straight track". Alfred Watkins' initial concept was a network of rectilinear transport routes across the countryside, joining landmarks.

Watkins came up with the name "ley", allegedly because he noticed an association with place names ending in "ley". As that is a common ending, meaning "lea" ("meadow") he may as well have called them "ton lines" or "ham lines" or "thorpe lines".

It was soon realised that the straight tracks that Watkins had postulated would not be practical routes because they sometimes did things like crossing marshes and wide rivers and going up steep cliffs. Real walking routes tend meander as they follow ridges, valleys and contours and use shallow crossings of rivers.

Rather than dropping the idea as obviously silly, people scratched around looking for an alternative "explanation" for this completely illusory phenomenon. They postulated some ancient lost wisdom, and some ill-defined primordial force. Later this became associated in some people's minds with disparate ideas such as acupuncture: menhirs as acupuncture needles to cure the Earth, blah blah.

Aside: I remember going to Arbor Low in Derbyshire and seeing two things at the same time: the farmer's daughter on a quad bike riding around the inside of the ancient earth bank as if it were a wall of death, and a couple of harmless eccentrics dangling pendulums (pendula?) over the stones. I swear I heard one of them shout to his companion words to the effect, "I've found a nexus of primeval force."

Back onto my own straight track: I read a number of books on leys at the time (the word "line" had largely been dropped by then) and there were various pseudo statistical ways of calculating the lines. A church was worth 3 points, a standing stone worth 4, a cross roads 2, and so on. (I made up these numerical values for the sake of illustration.) A quick review of the list showed that things like "a straight section of road" or "a distinctive hill top" were also on the list.

Given enough random and unrelated items like that, it will always be possible to find alignments that add up to some arbitrary threshold number. However, a little thought shows that these are not completely random and unrelated items. It is common for a road to head in a straight line towards a major church. Cross roads are always on roads, some of which have straight sections. A standing stone or church may be on a distinctive hilltop. A church may be built on an earlier religious site. And so on.

On the other hand, items that appear at first glance to be related, such as "earthworks" may be separated in age by 3,000 years and be from different cultures and belief systems. Of four "ancient earthworks", one may be defensive, one funerary, one agricultural, and one ritual.

Any two points will always be in a straight line relative to each other. The chance that a third random point is within a degree either side of that line is 1/180. That's not rare. if I had a 1/180chance of being knocked off my motorbike every ride, I would not ride it.

The chance of a fourth point being within 1 degree of the same line is also 1/180, so the chance of points 3 and 4 both being within a degree of the line between points 1 and 2 is 1/(180*180) which is 1/32,400 which is a small chance.

However, if you allow yourself the freedom to look for any and all possible alignments, then the more random points you have, the more alignments you will find, because every pair of points is a new line that a third or fourth point may also be on. It's like the thing with birthdays: the chance of a single random stranger having the same birthday as you is around 1/365, but if you have 50 people in the room, it is extremely likely that two of them will have the same birthday as each other.

The clever thing is, don't count all the things that are not aligned. "I looked at 20 sites and found 6 alignments of 3," is more impressive than, "Out of 190 pairs of points, I found 6 cases where a third point was in line."

Of course, this does not preclude the possibility that some ancient sites were deliberately aligned with each other. Items of a similar age, or built in obvious succession for related purposes may well be aligned. That is a natural human urge to be orderly. Whether or not the "wise ancients" believed in any force flowing along those lines, there is no evidence that such a force exists.

Ley lines: fun, interesting, but a barmy idea.
 
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'Undercurrents' magazine was quite heavily into that kind of thing.

INT21
 
Coal said:
I wrote a program in the 1980's to find 'ley-lines'. Specifically, it allowed one to input the map references of 'points of interest' on a 1:50000 map and then search then entire entry list for alignments. It took every possible pair or points, plotted a straight line and worked out the perpendicular distance of every other point from the line. More than '3' counted as a 'ley'.
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Mikefule said:
On the other hand, items that appear at first glance to be related, such as "earthworks" may be separated in age by 3,000 years and be from different cultures and belief systems. Of four "ancient earthworks", one may be defensive, one funerary, one agricultural, and one ritual.
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They're also large, compared with, for example a standing stone. Even a small earthwork, say 50 yards across can line up with a startling number of other points. Badbury rings will align with half of Dorset.

Of course you can 'align' with the outer edge or anywhere in between. That was awkward to program for, but it was the case that earthworks cropped up in a lot of alignments. When the program created random points, seeded on the original map data, I relocated the whole earthwork.

And, as you say, age, use etc.

Mikefule said:
Any two points will always be in a straight line relative to each other. The chance that a third random point is within a degree either side of that line is 1/180. That's not rare. if I had a 1/180chance of being knocked off my motorbike every ride, I would not ride it.

The chance of a fourth point being within 1 degree of the same line is also 1/180, so the chance of points 3 and 4 both being within a degree of the line between points 1 and 2 is 1/(180*180) which is 1/32,400 which is a small chance.
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From memory that was pretty much the ratio of 3 point alignments to 4 point from map data. A five point alignment (that didn't have two earth works in it ;) ] was a very rare occurrence in real or randomised data. The program never found one which didn't have a fat earthwork (or two) in it somewhere.

There is a way to consider every possible straight line in an area and check the distance of all the point from every theoretical line. I've got a note of in in the loft somewhere, but my little Amstrad didn't have the power to run it and deriving it is beyond my addled maths capabilities these days.

Mikefule said:
However, if you allow yourself the freedom to look for any and all possible alignments, then the more random points you have, the more alignments you will find, because every pair of points is a new line that a third or fourth point may also be on. It's like the thing with birthdays: the chance of a single random stranger having the same birthday as you is around 1/365, but if you have 50 people in the room, it is extremely likely that two of them will have the same birthday as each other.
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The only correlation that I got was 'more points' = 'more alignments', as you say.

Next time the loft is open, I'll see if I can find the folder with Tom Graves' letter and post it.
 
Yesterday I evoked something called the Orthoténie, and, because my ufologic memories are more than rusty, I attributed this theory/technique to Jacques Valée, when the correct is Aimé Michel. Michel was inspired, by the way, by another Jacques, Jacques Bergier, that showed him the significance of observing phenomena that could be found happening three or four times on a straight line. Michel tried this hypothesis on the UFO sightings over France on a giving date, 24/09/1954 : he found that, on a straight line, from Bayonne to Vichy (485 km), not only 3 or 4 sightings could be marked, but 6, all in the same night. Michel tried this method on many other sightings on a giving period of 24 or 48 hours, always succeeding in plotting a number of phenomena over straight lines between cities or regions. Again, inspired by Bergier, Michel found that he could cross this lines and find a single intersection point. Giving a mathematic background to the method, an American, Alexander Mebane, found that the alignment of 3 or 4 phenomena/sightings could be dismissed as coincidence, but 6 phenomena aligned had a probability between 1/500000 and 1/400000000.

All this argumentation was refuted, in a way or another, by scientific magazines and publications, and the Orthoténie was forgotten on the rusty memory of teenage wannabe ufologists.

It would be interesting applying this method to lay lines. It would be, also, proof of scientific rigour to submit the ley lines theories to the many refutations once endured by the Orthoténie.
 
Mikefule said:
...I remember falling victim to the ley hunting bug as a teenager and again in my 20s. I was excited to "discover" that Southwell Minster (near to where I live) is "on a ley line"...
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Early teens for me.

But, you know what - as (probable) illusions go, ley-hunting is potentially an incredibly educational one. I spent hours poring over maps and learned an awful lot about the geography and history of my locality. I also learned to love that locality - and to read a map. (By coincidence, I lived very near to Arbor Low, which is a great nexus for the avid ley hunter.)

I've always loved a map, and I can't help wondering now if it was maybe that early enthusiasm which inspired that attraction - and I don't resent a moment spent on it. It may all be in our imagination - but I'd say that this is one instance where that is not necessarily a bad thing.
 
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I liked this opening for an article by Paul Devereux about ley lines in Fortean Times of June 2007:

Ever since Alfred Watkins announced his discovery of a network of ancient alignments crisscrossing the British countryside, the history of leys has been less of an old straight track and more of a long and winding road, one that has taken detours into everything from ufology to dowsing.​

Poor Watkins! He was only trying to put some sort of order system into mapping remarkable places and things really spiraled out of control. This happens quite often as conceptual concepts related to actual factual or scientific concepts lose original meaning and clarity, or the terms get conflated.

I may have posted this earlier in the thread but I took a look at leys from a geological perspective here: https://spookygeology.com/leylines-from-the-old-straight-track-to-the-ghostbusters-vortex/

I also recommend Spooky Archaeology by Jeb Card (2018) which includes this subject and TONS more fascinating stuff. That book is gold.
 
Sharon Hill said:
...I also recommend Spooky Archaeology by Jeb Card (2018) which includes this subject and TONS more fascinating stuff. That book is gold.
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And costs about the same. But looks fascinating....must resssiiisssstttt!!!

When you are standing at a high point in the White Peak area of the UK Peak District, where I was fortunate enough to be brought up - and where every hill, bump and rise seems to have a burial mound plonked on its ridge - it's actually quite hard not to see some sort of pattern in those ancient additions to the landscape. I'd hasten to add that I'm commenting on human nature, rather than actually suggesting that there is actually a system to the placement.

However, I've often wondered if human nature has also played a part in the initial acts, as well as their interpretation. If you were burying an important figure on a hill between two others which already had mounds on top, might it not seem somehow natural to place the new one at a point along the line that connects the other two? And might it not be that this possibly unconscious, but very simple desire, for some sort of order has been entirely misconstrued, forming the later conviction that much more complex forces were at play.

Sheer conjecture - which may simply be a reflection my own tidy nature, of course.
 
chicorea said:
Well, Alèse couldn't be a town : it's the name of a cover we use over the bed. Alès is a town in Cevénnes, in Département du Gard, remarkable for being.... unremarkable. There is very few about its history during Roman times (it's considered as an oppidium, so a small town in the main Roman roads) or Middle Ages. It was a Protestant fortress during the Religious Wars and it suffered a siege because of it. Otherwise, nothing that seems specially energetic.

I'm familiar with the Louvre/Tuilleries axe and La Défense and I can attest that the energies there are kinda palpable on this places. But, then again, it is, as much as, on other places in the Parisian region, not necessarily over the same axe.

I suspect that ley lines alone can't be the only source of what "energises" a place, a town, a monument.

By the way, the lines over the map made me think almost immediately of the vintage Orthotenies, proposed by Jacques Valée for proving statistically the reality of UFO sightings. Interesting how some patterns keep coming back...
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Actually the idea was proposed by Aime Michel in the context of the 1954 wave, although Vallee did the first statistical analysis of the claims. Broadly most of the lines were explicable, but the Bayonne-Vichy line BAVIC was the subject of a very sophisticated analysis by David Saunders, and seemed to be valid. Michel also found some very interesting points on the line, e.g. ancient cave paintings, the birthplace of St Vincent de Paul, etc. I found there to be a lot of writers on esoteric subjects born near BAVIC, also saints, also the Cyclic Cross of Hendaye (said to predict the end of the world) lies very close to it. Coincidence or not? I think these things just hint at possible underlying causes, and it is worth noting that when a couple of dowsers studied the energies associated with the famous St Michael leyline, they found two separate lines of energy moving in serpentine fashion. The ley seems to be an artifact of the fact that a lot of significant neolithic and religious locations were sited on one or both of the lines and as the general trend of the two lines was roughly linear, the chances of a seemingly significant "ley" appearing were higher than normal.
 
"energies" - the most overused word by paranormalists.

Energy = the quantitative property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.

Has anyone measured these "energies"? Quantitatively? Psychically doesn't count.
 
Sharon Hill said:
"energies" - the most overused word by paranormalists.

Energy = the quantitative property that must be transferred to an object in order to perform work on, or to heat, the object.

Has anyone measured these "energies"? Quantitatively? Psychically doesn't count.
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Thank you!

Indeed '"energy" is an over-used word by in the psychic field of research by those who don't realise that throwing the word around like they know what it means does not lend credibility to what they are trying to say. "Energy" is closely followed by "vibration" and "frequency" - both real terms with real meaning which just reveal scientific illiteracy by most users in this field.

The trouble is, English doesn't have a suitable substitute that I can think of. "Power" or "force" are equally unsuitable. Maybe we need to look much further afield and look for words used by other cultures, and not translate them back into English.
 
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