Alternative Britain | Landscape
The Truth About Ley Lines
Alfred Watkins’ ancient tracks or telluric tram lines?
Much has been written about ley lines, but amid the sacred energy, UFOs and levitating boulders, it’s sometimes forgotten that the phrase was coined by a modest man who believed that ley lines were simply ancient trackways.
One bright afternoon at the end of June 1921, a gleaming roadster — a rakish 1919 Wolseley Stellite, its brass trim glinting in the sharp sunlight — pulled over at Blackwardine Cross in Herefordshire. Its 66-year-old driver, who had spent his life exploring every corner of the county as an outrider for the family businesses of flour milling and brewing, had no need for directions, but consulted his map anyway.
Something else was on his mind.
As he glanced between the map and the landscape, Alfred Watkins — retired businessman, amateur antiquary and expert beekeeper; a photographer, baker and the inventor both of an exposure meter and a novel form of brown loaf — had something of an epiphany. Indeed, it was such a profound revelation, Watkins later claimed to have tapped…
