Thursday, September 01, 2005

The Mystery of Leylines


What are leylines? Are they merely ancient paths or do they hold some kind of mystical earth power? Is it true that UFOs have been seen in the sky following leylines?

Growing up as I did in the County of Essex, England, I had heard about leylines but it was not until I did research for my book Extraordinary Places…Close to London (see page 37) that I realized there are leylines in other parts of the world too. The Lines of Nazca, Peru (see photo), the Altiplano of Bolivia, and right here in the United States, we have the Great North Road on the Chaco in Arizona. These as well as other locations around the world all offer similar characteristics: long straight roads with monuments, churches, rings of stones, places of historic interest, etc. that mark the way. Often these leylines cannot be seen from ground level but can be clearly seen from the air. Why would that happen?

One of the first people to notice and document leylines in England was Alfred Watkins (1855-1935) who was an avid photographer. Watkins’ son, Allen, later wrote about his father’s discovery. “Then without any warning it all happened suddenly. His mind was flooded with a rush of images forming one coherent plan. The scales fell from his eyes and he saw that over many long years of prehistory, all trackways were in straight lines marked out by experts on a sighting system. The whole plan of The Old Straight Track stood suddenly revealed.”

Interestingly, the leylines in England do follow a straight path over terrain that could be more easily navigated by a circuitous route. This is true in other countries too where the tracks have taken a traveler up and over a mountain rather than an easier route around it. Is there some reason to keep a track straight?


Watkins never gave us an explanation for these ancient tracks that are now called leylines. Dowsing experts have followed the leylines and tell us there is subterranean water activity. To this day, pilots follow leylines as they navigate the skies, so is it so strange to think that if we have been ‘visited’ by UFOs, they would also follow the same lines? Many believe animals possess extra sensitivity to earth power and congregate at certain spots that have been deemed leylines. When something strange happens in a village, the incident is often expressed as, “…well, what do you expect, it’s on a leyline…”