Mystic lines that fascinated everyone

One hundred years ago, a respectable Herefordshire businessman published a book which had little impact at the time, but which had huge numbers of fans 40 years after he died, and nowhere more than in the West Country.

- Eugene Byrne, our man in the kaftan and flared jeans goes hunting (with his dowsing rods) for the story of ley lines.

THE most striking set of examples of church alignment in Bristol ... is that where a four church ley — St. Michael's, St. John’s, Christchurch, and St. Mary le Port (lying on Broad Street which, however, swerves a little) — crosses with another church ley passing through Christmas Steps, the site of a monastery at the top of this, St. John’s Church and gate, and St. Peter's ... Broad Street actually passes under the spire of St. John’s Church, which is built on the city wall, and has no east or west windows ... The fact of these two leys passing through the tower site indicates that before being that of a city gate it was a prehistoric mark-point. Bristol, with many prehistoric sites aligning, is rich ground for ley hunting.

That's Alfred Watkins writing about Bristol in his book The Old Straight Track, published in 1925. Watkins believed that our ancestors recognised that there were straight lines linking prominent landscape features and prehistoric sites, that these became trade routes, or sometimes ceremonial ones, and so would deliberately build structures along them.

These were “ley lines’

Whatever happened to ley lines? Like Donny Osmond and platform soles they used to be big in the 1970s but now, not so much.

If you're old enough, you'll remember how ley lines used to be a big deal with hippies and aficionados of the occult, the mysterious and esoteric. Then they went mainstream, up there with astrology and graphology (a short-lived belief that a person’s handwriting revealed the writer's personality).