A Century of The Old Straight Track Club
As primroses and violets charm from verdant banks (all this rain does at least maintain our status as a green, if not always pleasant land), people start venturing on country walks. As your stroll takes you from church to knoll, to sunken lane (to pub or tea room) on a series of straight stretches, do you think ‘Ooooh, could this be a ley line’?
Ley lines were – what would be the right word? Invented? Discovered? Diagnosed? by a landscape photographer Alfred Watkins just over 100 years ago in 1925. As well as being a photographer, passionate about our landscape, Watkins was an antiquarian, bee keeper and archaeologist with a keen interest in nature. While looking at his map for somewhere interesting to go, he was struck by the way ancient sites seemed to be connected by straight lines. Barrows, tumuli, standing stones, hill forts (and churches that often usurped more ancient sites of worship), seemed to provide our distant ancestors with points by which to navigate their way.
Watkins wrote a book, ‘The Old Straight Track’, which has been steadily in print since it was first published in 1925. This gave rise to ‘The Old Straight Track Club’ which his supporters founded to encourage others to hunt down these straight tracks, which he named ‘ley lines’ from the Old English word for a clearing (‘ley’) which occurs in so many British place names, like Camberley or Shipley. A similar idea arose in the 1920s in Germany, there named ‘holy’ tracks’ (‘heilige linien’), all drawing on ideas that arose in the 19th century.
Watkins and his ley line-hunting friends ascribed no arcane mystery to these tracks. Other groups, however, took his idea and poetically wondered if there was something more to them. Theories arose that the earth’s crust is thinner along ley lines allowing telluric (electrical) or magnetic currents to guide our more magnetism-sensitive ancestors, migratory birds (and, in the 1960s, more radically, alien visitors). The mystical stone circles could be built as places of worship where this energy could be harnessed and fed and earth’s fertility encouraged. By 1969, ‘The View over Atlantis’ by John Michell suggested all our great ancient monuments are connected by a sacred geometry made up of networks of ley lines which protect earth’s harmony.
Much to Watkins’ frustration, ‘serious’ historians poo-pooed Watkins’ research, arguing that some of his ley lines were too hilly to be practical as trade routes. He has since been proved right in believing that our ancestors were more sophisticated than was then believed and were indeed responsible for a lot of forestry clearing.
So, the next time the sun shines on your day off, go for a decent walk. But before you go, check out your route and if you come across three or more of the following aligned, you may be on a ley line.
- Ancient mounds (tumuli, barrows, cairns etc)
- Ancient unworked stones
- Moats and islands in ponds
- Traditional or holy wells
- Beacon points
- Crossroads with place names and ancient wayside crosses
- Churches with ancient foundations
- Ancient castles / place names with ‘castle’ in.