effulgentpoet:

history aesthetics

LEY LINES

The concept of “ley lines” originated with Alfred Watkins in his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, though Watkins also drew on earlier ideas about alignments; in particular he cited the work of the English astronomer Norman Lockyer, who argued that ancient alignments might be oriented to sunrise and sunset at solstices. On 30 June 1921, Alfred Watkins visited Blackwardine in Herefordshire,
and had been driving along a road near the village (which has now
virtually disappeared). Attracted by the nearby archaeological
investigation of a Roman camp, he stopped his car to compare the
landscape on either side of the road with the marked features on his
much used map. While gazing at the scene around him and consulting the
map, he saw, in the words of his son, “like a chain of fairy lights” a
series of straight alignments of various ancient features, such as
standing stones, wayside crosses, causeways, hill forts, and ancient churches on mounds.
He realized immediately that the potential discovery had to be checked
from higher ground when, during a revelation, he noticed that many of
the footpaths there seemed to connect one hilltop to another in a
straight line.He subsequently coined the term “ley” at least partly because the lines passed through places whose names contained the syllable ley, stating that philologists defined the word differently, but had misinterpreted it. He believed this was the ancient name for the trackways, preserved in
the modern names. The ancient surveyors who supposedly made the lines
were given the name “dodmen”. Watkins believed that, in ancient times, when Britain was far more densely forested,
the country was criss-crossed by a network of straight-line travel
routes, with prominent features of the landscape being used as navigation points. This observation was made public at a meeting of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club of Hereford in September 1921. X