{"id":29473,"date":"2026-02-26T16:06:47","date_gmt":"2026-02-26T15:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.propertysurveying.co.uk\/newsletter\/?page_id=29473"},"modified":"2026-02-26T16:06:47","modified_gmt":"2026-02-26T15:06:47","slug":"a-century-of-the-old-straight-track-club","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.propertysurveying.co.uk\/newsletter\/?page_id=29473","title":{"rendered":"A Century of The Old Straight Track Club"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Century of The Old Straight Track Club<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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 \u2018Ooooh, could this be a ley line\u2019?<\/p>\n

Ley lines were \u2013 what would be the right word? Invented? Discovered? Diagnosed? by a landscape photographer Alfred Watkins just over 100 years ago in 1925.\u00a0 As well as being a photographer, passionate about our landscape, Watkins was an antiquarian, bee keeper and archaeologist with a keen interest in nature.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Watkins wrote a book, \u2018The Old Straight Track\u2019, which has been steadily in print since it was first published in 1925.\u00a0 This gave rise to \u2018The Old Straight Track Club\u2019 which his supporters founded to encourage others to hunt down these straight tracks, which he named \u2018ley lines\u2019 from the Old English word for a clearing (\u2018ley\u2019) which occurs in so many British place names, like Camberley or Shipley.\u00a0 A similar idea arose in the 1920s in Germany, there named \u2018holy\u2019 tracks\u2019 (\u2018heilige linien\u2019), all drawing on ideas that arose in the 19th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

Watkins and his ley line-hunting friends ascribed no arcane mystery to these tracks.\u00a0 Other groups, however, took his idea and poetically wondered if there was something more to them.\u00a0 Theories arose that the earth\u2019s 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).\u00a0 The mystical stone circles could be built as places of worship where this energy could be harnessed and fed and earth\u2019s fertility encouraged.\u00a0 By 1969, \u2018The View over Atlantis\u2019 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\u2019s harmony.<\/p>\n

Much to Watkins\u2019 frustration, \u2018serious\u2019 historians poo-pooed Watkins\u2019 research, arguing that some of his ley lines were too hilly to be practical as trade routes.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

So, the next time the sun shines on your day off, go for a decent walk.\u00a0\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n