LEY LINES of Ancient Britain

The Ley Lines
of Ancient Britian
so named
by Alfred Watkins
and created by
Megalithic Surveyors
and Astronomers
of the Heavens

Alfred Watkins
The Old Straight Track

Pioneer for the idea
that ancient surveyors
were at work in Britain.

The Old Straight Track:
Its Mounds, Beacons Moats, Sites and Mark Stones
first published in 1925
has been published by Garnstone Press of London, and since 1974 by Abacus, a division of Little, Brown and Company (UK), Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN, England, United Kingdom.
The ISBN number is 0 349 13707 2

This book is the classic on Ley Lines, a term originally used by Alfred Watkins, who had observed that many ancient sites in Britain seemed to fall on straight lines of unknown origin. Watkins thought that a great network of such lines existed, and were oriented to either the sun, moon or stars.

"Ley lines" or "Leylines"
are terms currently used for the lines initially called "Leys"
by Alfred Watkins to apply to his theory
- conceived in 1921 and first published in 1922 -
that many ancient sites in Britain
(stone circles, rings, barrows, tumuli, chalk hill figures, etc.)
were purposely aligned in straight lines on the British landscape
in the ancient Neolithic (Stone Age) era.

Early British Trackways (1922)
was Watkins first book.

The subsequent publication, The Old Straight Track (1925)
is generally regarded to be his main contribution.
This was followed by the The Ley Hunters Manual (1927)
and Archaic Tracks Around Cambridge (1932).

Watkins chose the word LEY
for its alleged original Saxon meaning of "cleared glade",
which finds its Indo-European comparable
in the actual Latvian word LAUks "field"
and the hypothetical Indo-European term *LEUK.

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary traces the word LEY
to a root of LEA meaning "track of open ground"
and LEA of course was the abbreviation
for a LEAGUE as a distance.

Watkins pointed to the LONG Man at Wilmington
(who holds two measuring rods
- each about a man´s height - i.e. ca. 2 yards long)
as evidence of the ancient presence of land surveyors in Britain.

In 1974, Maria Reiche,
identified the types of "chalk hill figures"
found in the Southern parts of Britain
as genetically related in origin to the similarly gigantic
Nazca figures
found etched into the landscape in Peru.

An analysis of some of the major allegedly existing Ley Lines
shows that they related to the major triangulation axis
of the Long Man, the Cerne Giant and the White Horse of Uffington.
 

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