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Ley Lines: The Greatest Landscape Mystery

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The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Biography: Alfred Watkins was born in Hereford in 1855 and was an enthusiastic early photographer, the inventor of much apparatus, including the pinhole camera and the Watkins exposure meter. I discovered The Old Straight Track in the mid-1970s, the era of the Stonehenge free festivals and a time when Watkins’ ley lines were the height of countercultural fashion. The bubble was burst, a little, in the late 1980s when scholars Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy worked out that the density of archaeological sites in the British landscape is so great that a line drawn through virtually anywhere would "clip" any number of significant places.

Earlier this year, artist and performer bones tan jones walked from Silvertown, in the London Borough of Newham, to the sacred circle of Stonehenge.This revised and updated edition of the book by Danny Sullivan is the classic, comprehensive guide to the subject. He also observed the recurrence of "cole" and "dod" in English place-names, thus suggesting that the individuals who established these lines were referred to as a "coleman" or " dodman". The Abacus edition of 1970 was reprinted up to 1999 at least, and carries a copyright dated 1970 "Allen Watkins and Marion Watkins". Iain Sinclair’s early poetry, especially the 1975 book Lud Heat, explicitly centres on the notion of ley lines under the urban landscape of London, complete with maps.

As David Newnham wrote in 2000: "Throughout the 60s and 70s, ley-line theory was to mutate and bifurcate, to bend with every passing fad, so that it frequently seemed as though its only purpose was to highlight the failings of our own times. The authors, both 'alternative archaeologists', explore the theory of ley lines with the belief that lines and patterns formed by joining up ancient sites prove the existence of a megalithic science based on a mysterious force (oh dear! Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). From dialogues on poetics to meditations on how one continues to create in a country (world) of non-stop war, these elegantly curated triads reverberate with collective insights.

Watkins died in 1935, and a decade or so later the club disbanded; the journey along the old straight track seemed to have petered out and Watkins’ work was just another dead end in the story of the relationship between the geography and history of Britain, to be filed away with the British Israelites and hunters after King Arthur’s cave.

That is how our ancestors found and manipulated natural earth energies to place standing stones, circles and cup-marked stones, and that is the only way they will be understood. As part of their book, they examined the example of the West Penwith district that Michell had set out as a challenge to archaeologists during the previous decade.

He presented this as a challenge to archaeologists, urging them to examine his ideas in detail and stating that he would donate a large sum of money to charity if they could disprove them.

However, as most authors know, books can take on a life of their own and the arc of their journeys can shift in unpredictable ways. Still in print, the book speaks from a more innocent age: blending a love of rural and historic Herefordshire with quotes from WB Yeats and George Borrow, and a charming openness about his own assumptions. But at heart, this practical man of means insisted that ley lines were a crucial element of pre-Roman British trade, tentative first steps on the journey to the mercantile empire in which Watkins grew up.Though instead of being a book about my work it would act as an extension of the wider concerns found within, using other people’s viewpoints and through a different medium. Part of the popularity of ley hunting was that individuals without any form of professional training in archaeology could take part and feel that they could rediscover "the magical landscapes of the past". Bel Jacobs explores the history and meaning of ley lines, and talks to the artist they have inspired. Writing students, art students, and any reader engaged in artistic practice will find in Ley Lines not a how-to manual or step-by-step instruction but an inexhaustible vein of instructive reflection on imaginative work and the creative life.

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