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In this more enlightened age when talking about things such as magic, spirits and unexplained forces no longer demands the church to burn you as a heretic, one of the areas of new Age interest is Ley Lines. People claim to be able to plot these lines of mystic energy across the landscape using divining rods, pendulums or sheer will power. These lines supposedly link sites of ancient power, burial sites, crossroads, sites of old temples etc. Is this all a load of New Age claptrap, are people just milking a theory that is mainly nonsense.

In 1925 a book was published by Alfred Watkins, called the Old Straight Track, which may shed some light on these modern fanciful ideas. Whilst travelling around his native county of Herefordshire in England Watkins noticed that ancient sites, beacon hills, mounds, earthworks, moats and old churches built on earlier pagan sites all seemed to fall into straight lines. Upon further investigation he discovered the remains of a vast network of track ways and road systems that criss-crossed the land in pre-Roman times. Those Latin interlopers may be able to lay claim to having built the best roads in ancient Britain, but they were not the first. These old roads were the network used by merchants to cross the country selling their goods, salt, coal, food and a myriad of other commodities. As these roads became established it became the natural thing that features would grow up on the side of these roads, markets, churches, villages etc. In the modern age the roads themselves are long gone from the landscape and remain only in place names and tradition. What is left, however is the ghost of their presence in the straight alignment of the associated features.

No mystical energies, no spooky forces, just the remains of the practical business of commerce.

Learn more about this author, Dave Franklin.
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