London's Ley Lines Pathways of Enlightenment

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Ron Shoesmith, Alfred Watkins, A Herefordshire Man, Little Logaston Woonton Almeley, Herefordshire 1990.

Clark, John (2018). " 'Brut sett London Stone': London and London Stone in a 14th-century English Metrical Chronicle". Transactions of London and Middlesex Archaeological Society. 69: 171–80. Anon. (1860). Halliwell, J. O. (ed.). A Treatyse of a Galaunt, with the Maryage of the Fayre Pusell the Bosse of Byllyngesgate Unto London Stone. London: Printed for the Editor. T. C. Lethbridge. Gogmagog: The Buried Gods. London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1957. [ Google Scholar]

Well before Watkins took up antiquarian pursuits in his sixties he was famous as a highly successful populariser of photography, inventing and successfully marketing photographic aids and authoring a key text for amateur photographers Photography: Its Principles and Applications. Watkins took up photography in 1875, aged twenty. He developed his photographic practice alongside a career running the family’s brewery and flour-milling business in Hereford. Watkins focused on flour milling because it offered opportunities for modernising the industry (replacing mill stones with steel rollers, electrifying the plant) and widening his horizons, taking him not only throughout the region to meet farmers but to London markets too. Among the products of the The Imperial Flour Mills, as they were called,was a patent nutritious flour, so called Vagos (named after the Roman name for the river Wye flowing through the city), which sold nationally. Watkins was a liberal activist, campaigning for free trade against Tory tariff policies, largely on the virtues of cheap British staple food, and gave lantern-slide lectures around Herefordshire which attracted the newly enfranchised class of labouring men, some of whom recalled the hungry years of the nineteenth century, who helped create the liberal electoral landslide of 1909. 9 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". [31] Ley hunting welcomed those who had "a strong interest in the past but feel excluded from the narrow confines of orthodox academia". [32] The ley hunting movement often blended their activities with other esoteric practices, such as numerology and dowsing. [33] The movement had a diverse base, consisting of individuals from different classes and of different political opinions: it contained adherents of both radical left and radical right ideologies. [34] Ley hunters often differed on how they understood the ley lines; some believed that leys only marked a pre-existing energy current, whereas others thought that the leys helped to control and direct this energy. [35] They were nevertheless generally in agreement that the ley lines were laid out between 5000 BCE and 2600 BCE, after the introduction of agriculture but before the introduction of metal in Britain. [36] For many ley hunters, this Neolithic period was seen as a golden age in which Britons lived in harmony with the natural environment. [35] Alfred Watkins, ‘A Summer Among the Dovecotes’, English Illustrated Magazine,1892, pp. 45–53. On Gere and New see Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800–1914, London, 1978, pp.315, 399. Hutton, Ronald (2013). Pagan Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-197716.

The line crosses the Prime Meridian right next to Greenwich Observatory, where that meridian was established. It touches the statue of General Wolfe, who defeated the French at Québec and won Canada for the British. If you can suggest any other uses for Ley Lines, eg landing runways for alien spacecraft, etc; then please let me know. Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1941). Stewart, Randall (ed.). The English Notebooks: Based upon the Original Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. New York & London: Modern Languages Association of America, Oxford University Press. p.289. Julian Holloway, and James Kneale. “Locating haunting: A ghost hunter’s guide.” Cultural Geographies 15 (2008): 297–312. [ Google Scholar] [ CrossRef] In any case, the idea has gained a great deal of traction and popularity, however much it has evolved from Watkins’ first conception of it.Aerial archaeology was valued precisely for its modern, moneyed glamour, carrying the subject away from the control of old men like Watkins, the very figure of the antiquarian. Crawford was in his thirties, Piggott early twenties, as were Piper and Nash. Crawford was financially supported in civilian archaeology by Alexander Keiller (also in his thirties) who enjoyed a substantial private income from the family marmalade business. Their jointly authored Wessex from the Air (1928) is much more conscious of the heritage of archaeology than anything in Watkins’s works. One photograph of the Stonehenge Avenue (fig.10) also reveals in the form of a large white spot, surrounded by a darker band, a round barrow opened by the eighteenth-century Wiltshire field antiquarian, Sir Richard Colt Hoare; it is as much about the archaeology of archaeology, and its role in regional identity, as about that of the landscape itself. 38 Ley lines have been characterised as a form of pseudoscience. [52] On The Skeptic's Dictionary, the American philosopher and skeptic Robert Todd Carroll noted that none of the statements about magnetic forces underpinning putative ley lines have been scientifically verified. [51] Adrian J. Ivakhiv. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. [ Google Scholar] Julian Holloway. “Spiritual Embodiment and Sacred Rural Landscapes.” In Country Visions. Edited by Paul Cloke. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2003, pp. 158–75. [ Google Scholar]

The Malvern Hills in the United Kingdom, said by Alfred Watkins to have a ley line passing along their ridge Crawford founded Antiquity in 1927as a new kind of publication between a learned journal and the popular press to publicise serious research and scholarship, with high production values, classy typography, accessible writing and high quality illustrations, especially aerial photography. Antiquity particularly appealed to a literary and artistic audience, inspiring modern-minded artists with a taste for the primordial Britain, notably John Piper and Paul Nash. 36

Hutton, Ronald (2009). "Modern Druidry and Earth Mysteries". Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. 2 (3): 313–331. doi: 10.2752/175169609X12464529903137. S2CID 143506407. City of London Planning Case File: Relocation of London Stone". 20 October 2011. Archived from the original on 5 May 2013 . Retrieved 14 March 2013. Broadbent, Simon (1980). "Simulating the Ley Hunter". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General). 143 (2): 109–140. doi: 10.2307/2981985. JSTOR 2981985. The area’s attraction to well-heeled buyers in pursuit of peace and quiet shows no signs of abating; in 2017, Adele became the latest megastar to lay down roots here, in a Grade II-listed manor house. It seems that now, just as in the days of Archibald McIndoe and his Guinea Pigs, East Grinstead is a town that knows when to look away. It’s no wonder people of all stripes feel so at home here. Carroll, Robert Todd (3 December 2015). "Ley Lines". The Skeptic's Dictionary . Retrieved 16 September 2019.

He was an intensely rational person with an active intellect, and I think he would be a bit disappointed with some of the fringe aspects of ley lines today."

James Thurgill. “Enchanted Geographies: Experiences of place in contemporary British Landscape Mysticism.” Unpublished manuscript, last modified November 2014. Microsoft Word File. I was prompted to return to it by the appearance of some photographs by Alfred Watkins in the 2005 A Picture of Britainexhibition at Tate Britain and by current academic interests, in a number of disciplines, in visual representations of antiquity. 7 Leys and their accompanying energy lines probably occur all over the world and have been used by shamen, pagans, and others who are attuned to the network for millenia. Since my interest was sparked in the 1970s I’ve noticed how there’s not only a growing acceptance of them but also a widening belief that they form an energy grid that surrounds our planet. Street, Christopher E. (2010). London's Ley Lines: Pathways of Enlightenment. London: Earthstars Publishing. pp.183–9. ISBN 9780951596746.