http://www.pauldevereux.co.uk/new/html/body_leylines.html is a good site for leyline info here is a few paragraphs from it.
The subject of leys (or 'ley lines' or 'ley hunting') as we have come to know it is essentially a British one. Both the good and bad aspects can be blamed on the British! For 20 years I edited the only journal in the world devoted solely to leys, THE LEY HUNTER, and I think I have come to know the subject more intimately and in more detail than anyone else alive. The first thing I can assure you is that what is talked about in New Age journals, workshops and groups today about 'leylines' is mainly a combination of misunderstanding, old falsehoods, wishful thinking and downright fantasy. What I am going to tell you now is the true history of ley research. Like most histories, it is essentially a list of dates and names, but unless we understand the growth of the ley idea, we will never understand what leys are, and what it is we are dealing with.
The origin of the ley theory
In 1921, Englishman Alfred Watkins had a sudden perception (he called it a 'flood of ancestral memory'), while looking at a map of the Herefordshire countryside. He saw that various prehistoric places, such as standing stones, earthen burial mounds, prehistoric earthworked hills, and other such features fell into straight lines for miles across country. Watkins spent many years studying such alignments on the ground and on maps. He was a pioneer photographer and he took photographs of his alignments, wrote books and gave lectures. In response to his work, especially to his most important book, The Old Straight Track (1925), the Straight Track Club was formed, in which people all over Britain conducted field research looking for alignments of sites, and perhaps remnants of old straight tracks lying along them.
For about 7 years in the 1920s, Watkins referred to his alignments as 'leys'. This is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning 'cleared strips of ground' or 'meadows'. Watkins' theory of leys was that they were old straight traders' tracks laid down by surveyors in the Neolithic period of prehistory. They used surveying rods, he claimed, and it was this line-of-sight method that led to the straightness of the old tracks. The tracks ran from hilltop to hilltop, mountain ridge to mountain ridge, like 'a fairy chain' Watkins suggested. They cut through wild country, and in the valleys there was dense forest. Over time, this was cleared along the course of the straight tracks, Watkins maintained, and this was the reason he used the word 'ley' to describe such tracks. However, by 1929, he had discarded the use of the name 'ley' and referred to his alignments only as 'old straight tracks' or 'archaic tracks'.
Watkins felt that many of the key sighting points along these old straight tracks evolved into sacred sites, such as standing stones and burial mounds. Watkins felt that eventually the old straight tracks fell out of use, and so we only have the aligned sites today to indicate their courses or routes. He also theorised that in the historic, Christian era, some of the prehistoric, pagan sites became Christianised, and this explained why he found so many ancient churches standing on his alignments. It is certainly a fact that many such sites did become Christianised throughout Europe.
In 1935, Watkins died. In 1936, the British occultist Dion Fortune wrote a fictional book, a novel, called The Goat-Foot God, in which she put forward the notion of 'lines of force' connecting megalithic sites such as Avebury and Stonehenge in southern England. In 1938, Arthur Lawton, a member of the Straight Track Club, wrote a paper in which he claimed that leys were lines of cosmic force which could be dowsed. He was a dowser himself, and was impressed with the German geopathological dowsing that was then getting under way, and French dowsing work which claimed that there were lines of force beneath standing stones. Lawton put all this together in his own head and came up with his theory about leys.
In 1948, the Straight Track Club was closed down as there were only a few surviving members, and no new work was being done. The idea of Watkins' leys was kept alive by a few fringe writers and researchers in Britain during the 1950s. Probably in no other country in the world at this time was anyone preserving the idea of leys.
this is only the first of may pieces on leylines at this website
