The ancient network that links Britain

Alfred Watkins’ theory on “ley lines” – ancient tracks used for navigational purposes – captured the imagination of a nation but later became the subject of much controversy.

Tucked amid the UK’s glorious Welsh Marches region, the English county of Herefordshire glows a rich golden green. Talk to any local and he or she will likely refer to it as “God’s own country”. And rightly so – much of the earth here is made up of red sandstone clay that makes the area blossom into a Garden-of-Eden-like land of plenty every summer.

Crumbling abbey and castle ruins, historical market towns and churches all lie along the banks of the county’s idyllic River Wye, which breaks up into picturesque springs and streams that run into unspoiled valleys and ancient woodland.

It is hardly surprising, then, that famed authors have conceived of some of the world’s most famous fantasy literature here. JRR Tolkien imagined the White Mountains between Rohan and Gondor from The Lord of the Rings while walking in the bordering Malvern Hills, and CS Lewis saw Herefordshire as a real life Narnia.

But beyond its links to famed fiction writers, the county and its surroundings also inspired a much more mysterious and controversial piece of British literature.

Herefordshire is where self-taught amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins penned The Old Straight Track, a contentious book published in 1925 that posited one of the most well-known theories about ancient Britain of its time.

President of a local naturalists’ club, photography enthusiast, beekeeper and avid hiker, Watkins had a deep love for the countryside. When he travelled across Herefordshire by horse and cart for his family’s flour-milling business, he also hauled his heavy camera equipment and delicate glass negatives everywhere he went. In fact, his love for photography led him to invent several photography-related apparatuses, including a pin-hole camera and one of the first light metres (a device that measured the relative intensity of light), the highly successful Watkins Bee Meter.

But it was his ideas about “ley lines” – tracks developed by prehistoric man for navigational purposes – which he believed covered Herefordshire, all of the UK and possibly even the entire globe that brought him fame in the early 20th Century.

On a sunny afternoon in 1921, while he was out riding his horse along the rolling hills surrounding the hamlet of Blackwardine, Watkins had an astonishing revelation while looking out over the landscape, which he later described as being like a “flood of ancestral memory”.

It suddenly dawned on him that a network of lines stood out like “glowing wires all over the surface of the county”. He noted that these grid-like markings ran in perfectly straight paths, crisscrossing at certain locations he called “terminal points”, which usually coincided with sites such as beacons, mounds, holy wells (natural springs considered sacred), churches and ruins.

What he saw on that day inspired him to write his ideas down and create a theory which captured the imagination of a nation and later became the subject of much debate.

Watkins called these tracks “leys” or “ley lines” after noticing that the Anglo-Saxon word “ley”, which meant “a clearing in the woods”, was incorporated into many village names around Herefordshire, such as Weobley and Leysters.

He believed that these leys ran through the land, whether moorland or mountain, traversing “over whatever steep and seemingly improbable obstacles come in the way”.

Before intensive farming had rapidly changed the landscape, prehistoric Britain would have been covered in dense woodland, making it very difficult to navigate.

As imagined by Watkins, prehistoric man used the ley lines’ terminal points as beacons, or vantage points that could be used to scope out the landscape or send signals to faraway places. The Brecon Beacons National Park (pictured) in Wales is so named because many of the mountain summits in the park were once used to send fire signals to nearby settlements.

In the British countryside, a mound is a natural or man-made hump of rounded earth that stands higher than its immediate surroundings. These often pre-Roman glimpses into ancient Britain have shaped the nation’s cultural identity, although no-one really knows what many of them were used for.

Silbury Hill (pictured) is possibly the most quintessential example of an ancient British mound. Similar in height and volume to the Egyptian pyramids, the site was likely completed in around 2400BC and apparently contains no burial artefacts – casting doubt among historians and archaeologists as to whether it was ever used as a tomb.

There are hundreds of mounds dotting the British countryside, varying in shape and size and harking back to different periods of British history. For Watkins, they also represented terminal points, along with early Iron Age settlement camps and ancient castle ruins built on top of a motte and bailey – a raised earthwork that held an enclosed courtyard and was surrounded by a defensive ditch.

Early Christian missionaries had set up holy or sacred places on top of sites that might have been used for pagan worship, for graves of martyrs and as holy wells. And Watkins believed that these places often fell into alignment with beacons, man-made mounds and castles, making them another form of terminal point.

In his lesser-known book, The Old Standing Crosses of Herefordshire, Watkins explained that priests would mark holy places by putting up wooden, and later stone, crosses. They would then become areas where people could gather outdoors to listen to preachers. Churches were later built on these sites that became popular with worshippers.

Unfortunately, many crosses were destroyed during the Reformation, but an example of a standing cross can still be seen at the church of St John the Baptist in the village of Orcop (pictured). Also, there are more complete and incomplete crosses and original stone plinths which the crosses stood upon hidden throughout the Herefordshire countryside.

Llanthony Priory (pictured) in Wales is perhaps the most photographed ancient place of worship mentioned in The Old Straight Track. It’s nestled within a picturesque valley between the towns of Hay-on-Wye and Abergavenny on the Herefordshire border, which Watkins considered to be a prime area for ley lines.

He identified tracks that intersected the priory and ran straight up the surrounding hillsides. At the priory, there’s architectural evidence of a stone cresset, a stone carved with cup-shaped hollows which he believed were used to hold oil and used to light beacon signals.

A large section of Britain’s longest ancient monument, a long-distance walking trail called the Offas Dyke Path, runs adjacent to Llanthony Abbey. This mighty 176-mile legacy of the 8th-Century Anglo-Saxon monarch King Offa of Mercia, runs from the town of Prestatyn in North Wales to the town of Chepstow in the South at a rough height of 2.4m. While little is known about its purpose, theories range from it being a fortification rampart to a showy demonstration of King Offa’s wealth.

Recognising that the contours of old trails would inevitably change over the centuries, Watkins regarded the Hergest Ridge section of the Offas Dyke trail to be an exceptionally well-preserved part of a ley line. The ridge runs remarkably straight in many places as it traverses through the surrounding countryside.

Watkins speculated that this particular stretch of the path was possibly the site of an older track built before King Offa’s reign, which he later expanded.

Passing through hills and churches, it lies nestled in plain sight of surrounding beacons from Pen Y Fan, the highest peak in the Brecon Beacons National Park, to the highest peaks in the Malvern Hills to the east and Shropshire to the north. For Watkins, it was living proof of a straight ley line, embodying every element of what he had seen in the countryside on the day of his revelation.

Mark stones (used for navigational purposes) and standing stones (used for rituals and other ceremonies) are also found across the Herefordshire countryside. Watkins believed that mark stones like the “whetstone” found at Hergest Ridge or the stone found in the corner of an old house in the village of Pembridge marked important places of trade, and also fell into ley alignment.

He also believed that a darker truth might explain some of the standing stones he encountered in the Herefordshire countryside. For instance, the Queens Stone in the village of Symonds Yat has strange grooves painstakingly carved into its exterior, which Watkins dubiously imagined may have been used as slots for wooden poles to hold prisoners who were the victims of human sacrifice rituals.

Like many prehistoric monuments in western England and Wales, the Neolithic burial chamber of Arthur’s Stone (pictured) in the village of Dorstone, made of large stone slabs, has been linked to King Arthur since before the 13th Century. Watkins believed Arthur’s Stone was another terminal point which lay directly on a ley line.

According to Watkins, topographical sites that were used for sun and star alignment also rest on ley lines, and he said that Stonehenge, a circle of standing stones, “is a very striking and convincing example of the connection between sun alignment, long-distance tracks and the use of the beacons.”

While many believe Stonehenge to be a quintessential example of a prehistoric sun alignment site, Watkins believed that it was the crossing point of several long-distance ley alignments. He listed four in great detail in his “sun alignment” chapter of The Old Straight Track – one main ley, he believed, crossed the Old Sarum mound and Salisbury Cathedral to the south, while another runs from Bury Hill, the site of a former hillfort, to the east through what he termed the “slaughter stone” at Stonehenge.

Several of the alignments passing through the stones also traversed beacons, and so Watkins considered Stonehenge to be a significant hub in the ley-line network.

Perhaps the most famed of Watkins’ ley lines is St Michael’s, which is said to crisscross with three other ley lines at a specific point on St Michael’s Mount, Cornwall’s most iconic postcard picture. Shrouded in local folklore, the rocky tidal island has a history of being a trading port as well as a destination for pilgrims. And, it embodies many of the terminal point characteristics Watkins described – it sits high on a mound of earth above water, and is home to a holy well, medieval church and castle.

Many of the island’s visitors come in search of spirituality, as they believe it to have mystical energies and healing powers.

Fortunately for Watkins, his ley-line theory came at a time when rambling and hiking was undergoing a revival in Britain and a desire to get back to nature was trending across Europe. Thus, The Old Straight Track was rather warmly received during the years following its initial publication.

Watkins actively encouraged his readers to become “foot-archaeologists”, and even published The Ley Hunters Manual: A Guide to Early Tracks, which provided further instructions on how to find ley lines.

Nevertheless, this warm reception was short-lived, and the theory was quickly branded pseudo-nonsense after the professional archaeological community had sufficient time to examine it and counter-argue that lines could be drawn between any points on a map.

After archaeologists had distanced themselves from Watkins, the ley lines theory took a backseat until the 1960s, when a new wave of alternative thinking occurred in Britain.

This resurgence in popularity was arguably linked to authors like John Michell, who expanded upon Watkins’s theory. In his 1969 book View Over Atlantis, Michell argued that what little we know about the ancient geometry of the ley lines and the astrological alignments of ancient standing stones reflected knowledge that was as lost as the legendary city of Atlantis.

Today, there are so many theories about ley lines that a quick search of the words on the internet will bring up information on everything from Watkins’s original theory to theories of powerful energy lines and magnetic fields spanning the earth. Some even link UFO sightings and Freemason conspiracies to the lines.

Although Watkins’s study was focused on the UK, particularly in England and Wales, he believed ley lines could be sighted in other parts of the world. From the Western plains of Texas to the pagodas of Burma, Watkins outlined potential terminal points and ley lines by citing everything from the Bible to National Geographic Magazine.

Whether or not one agrees with ley lines, Watkins’s theory spoke more to people’s imagination and a universal desire to know more about our ancient ancestors than logic and reason. Even Watkins admitted that The Old Straight Track is imperfect as it doesn’t account for the order of historical events and the fact that many of these sites have been moved or otherwise changed over the years.

For many, his ideas represent a leap of faith that draws from the concept of innate ancestral memory and lie in plain sight – only visible to those who know how to look.