leyline

Ley lines are purported straight lines that connect various ancient monuments, landmarks, and landscape features across a region. The concept was popularized in early 20th-century Britain by amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, who in The Old Straight Track (1921) argued that prehistoric sites such as standing stones, barrows, and hill figures were arranged along a network of straight alignments. He suggested these lines marked trackways or carried significance beyond their individual monuments, possibly reflecting practical routes or hidden energies.

Over time, the idea was expanded beyond Britain and taken up by later writers and occultists. Some descriptions add notions of energetic or magical lines, sometimes called dragon lines, that supposedly channel power or serve ritual purposes. In popular culture, ley lines have appeared as plot devices in fiction, as inspiration for New Age practices, and as a lens for interpreting landscape and history.

Scientific assessment remains critical. Mainstream archaeology and geology regard ley lines as pseudoscience, lacking verifiable evidence of their existence or of any detectable energy along such lines. A number of studies argue that proposed alignments can arise from selective sampling, confirmation bias, or coincidental placement of sites on a map. When rigorously tested, there is no consistent method to identify true ley lines beyond subjective interpretation.

Today, ley lines persist in folklore, occult and New Age communities, and various cultural products, while most scholars treat them as a historic curiosity or a topic of cultural imagination rather than a factual geographic or energy system.