What is "ley line"

n. (lb en chiefly Forteana) supposed alignments of ancient geographical places such as megaliths

Ley lines are apparent alignments of places of significance in the geography or culture of an area, often including man-made structures. They are in the older sense, ancient, straight trackways in the British landscape, or in the newer sense, spiritual and mystical alignments of land forms.

The phrase was coined in 1921 by the amateur archaeologist Alfred Watkins, referring to supposed alignments of numerous places of geographical and historical interest, such as ancient monuments and megaliths, natural ridge-tops and water-fords. In his books Early British Trackways and The Old Straight Track, he sought to identify ancient trackways in the British landscape. Watkins later developed theories that these alignments were created for ease of overland trekking by line-of-sight navigation during neolithic times, and had persisted in the landscape over millennia.

In a book called The View Over Atlantis (1969), the writer John Michell revived the term "ley lines", associating it with spiritual and mystical theories about alignments of land forms, drawing on the Chinese concept of feng shui. He believed that a mystical network of ley lines existed across Britain.

Since the publication of Michell's book, the spiritualised version of the concept has been adopted by other authors and applied to landscapes in many places around the world. Both versions of the theory have been criticised on the grounds that a random distribution of a sufficient number of points on a plane will inevitably create alignments of random points purely by chance.