Ley lines are straight tracks that supposedly align ancient monuments and megaliths and are believed by some in the paranormal field to carry high levels of electromagnetic radiation. The reasoning came from William Henry Black in a speech given in 1870 to the British Archaeological Association, but archeologist and photographer Alfred Watkins (1855 – 1935) is considered the pioneering effort in naming and mapping many of them at the age of 66. He published two books on the topic, Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, both of which are still available. He believed that the lines were Neolithic roads that connected sites of worship, churches that had been built over pagan temples, mounds (ancient mass graves), bogs, ancient monuments and megaliths (stone circles), though, not always directly. Even though he attributed no mystical or paranormal significance to the ley lines, most were not convinced of his findings. Indeed, the theory that ley lines were roads or trade routes isn’t supported by skeptics because the lines would have forced travelers to cross over mountains and through rivers at some points.
Professor Alexander Thom of the University of Oxford, who published a paper called A Statistical Examination of Megalithic Sites in Britain in 1955, carried on his ideas. He proposed in his paper that the megaliths of Neolithic man were indeed connected by ley lines, though he refused to use the term for fear of criticism.
In the 1950s, Guy Underwood (1883 – 1964) dowsed many lines in Europe and found that many pagan sacred sites were built where two lines crossed; he called them “holy lines.”
With the discovery of the Nazca Lines, gigantic geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert, that stretches 53 miles between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana in Peru in the 1920s by pilots, some have even speculated that ley lines form some kind of astronomical alignments. However, maps produced of the ley lines don’t form any discernable shapes like the Nazca Lines.
However, some spots on some ley lines do indeed show a great deal more electormagnetic radiation than their srruondings. These places are published in the books Lodestone Compass: Chinese or Olmec Primacy? By John B. Carlson (1975) and Places of Power by Paul Devereux (1990); German authors Manfred Curry (1899 – 1953) and Ernst Hartmann called this force “earth radiation.” At one point, the Seattle Arts Commission gave a group of dowsers, called the Geo Group $5,000 to plot out the ley lines running across California.
Ley lines are not restricted to Europe, however. The Hopewell Ley line connects erathworks at Newark, Ohio with the Hopewell Native North American Indian necropolis at Chillicothe, in Ohio. Another seems to run on the property of Coral Castle in Miami Florida, which was built on two lines by Ed Leedskalnin.
In 1936, occultist Dion Fortune (born Violet Mary Firth Evans in 1890 – 1946) featured many of Watkins ideas in her book The Goat-footed God. For the first time, the ley lines were associated with mystical forces. Ireland is indeed covered with ley lines, and many of them connect mounds. In Irish mythology, ley lines were considered to be the roads fairies used when they traveled at night and on pagan holidays, now called sabbats. This makes sense when one considers that in Ireland they are known as Sídhe and are probably representations of the culture that one lived in Ireland, known as the Tuatha De Danann. They are inevitably connected with the dead. Long ago people were buried in mounds of dirt all across Europe, and the abode of the fairy is considered mounds. Even today, some superstitious people believe that if a house is built on a ley line, the house will be considered haunted until it is moved off of the line.
