ley line

Ley lines /leɪ laɪnz/ are apparent alignments of land forms, places of ancient religious significance or culture, often including man-made structures. They are ancient, straight 'paths' or routes in the landscape which are believed to have spiritual significance.

The phrase was coined in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, referring to supposed alignments of numerous places of geographical and historical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths, natural ridge-tops and water-fords. In his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, he sought to identify ancient trackways in the British landscape. Watkins later developed theories that these alignments were created for ease of overland trekking by line-of-sight navigation during neolithic times, and had persisted in the landscape over millennia.^[1] In his book The View Over Atlantis (1969), the writer John Michell revived the term "ley lines", associating it with spiritual and mystical theories about alignments of land forms, drawing on the Chinese concept of feng shui. He believed that a mystical network of ley lines existed across Britain,^[2] a notion actively promoted by "The Ley Hunter" magazine, edited at the time by his biographer, Paul Screeton.

Since the publication of Michell's book, the spiritualised version of the concept has been adopted by other authors and applied to landscapes in many places around the world.

The ley line hypothesis is a type of pseudoscience. A random distribution of a sufficient number of points on a plane will inevitably create alignments of random points purely by chance.wiki link read more