Main < Burl–Michell debate

One of the “giant beds” of Drenthe, Holland by Picardt (1660) illustrated in Megalithomania.
Courtesy Thames and Hudson

Living Leys or Laying the Lies?

Long before the outbreak of hostilities between archaeologists and treasure hunters using metal detectors, other battles raged with almost equal ferocity. They formed part of a war which was taking place between archaeologists and other groups who chose to approach the ancient past from different, and archaeologists would say, “unscientific” perspectives.

The most bitter of all such conflicts centred on a theory, first put forward by Alfred Watkins in 1921, that some prehistoric sites were deliberately and accurately aligned in their own landscapes. Archaeologists were, and continue to be, extremely sceptical about such alignments (leys) and dismissed ley hunters as “members of a lunatic fringe”.

This “war” has been a cold one. Archaeologists made scathing references to “moonshine over Stonehenge” from the corner of archaeological publications and ley hunters hit back from theirs.

In 1981, sixty years after Alfred Watkins started the whole controversy, Professor Richard Atkinson contributed an article to The Ley Hunter magazine which was answered by John Michell, amongst others. According to editor Paul Devereux, these articles formed “the first ever public debate between a high-ranking orthodox archaeologist and representatives of ley hunting research”.

This year, Popular Archaeology, cautiously opens its columns to some of the disputed areas, Ian Burrows criticises the Glastonbury Zodiac, William Veall offers his interpretation of Nazca, Isabel Winthrope links legend with the seabirds of an Italian holiday island and Richard Bailey reports on some serious research into dowsing. But, we begin with the fiercest battle of them all. Aubrey Burl and John Michell start “The Great Debate” with a dialogue about ley lines.

Aubrey Burl is an authority on stone circles and other early prehistoric ritual monuments. Before he retired to Edgbaston, he was Principal Lecturer in Archaeology at Hull College of Higher Education. He has excavated and directed excavations of stone circles and undertaken two lecture tours of the United States addressing such prestigious institutions as Harvard, Yale and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His many books include: Stone Circles of the British Isles (Yale U.P. 1976), Prehistoric Avebury (Yale, 1979) and Rites of the Gods (Dent, 1981). A new book about “the people of Stonehenge” will be published by Dent later this year.

John Michell was educated at Eton and Cambridge qualifying as a Russian interpreter and chartered surveyor before his first book, The Flying Saucer Vision was published in 1967. His second book, The View over Atlantis was published in 1969 and subsequent works include: The Old Stones of Land’s End (1974), The Earth Spirit (1975), Ancient Metrology (1980) and Megalithomania (1982).

Despite their weeks of hard, but always good-humoured exchanges, both Aubrey Burl and John Michell say that they enjoyed “The Great Debate” and Popular Archaeology hopes you will too!

Alfred Watkins, the discoverer of ley lines from The Ley Hunter’s Companion by Devereux and Thomson.
Courtesy: Thames and Hudson

MICHELL
Let me start with a brief definition of leys and an account of how the ley thesis first arose. In September, 1921, Mr Alfred Watkins, a 66-year-old antiquarian and business man of Hereford, gave a lantern lecture to the local Woolhope Club, claiming to have discovered a fundamental principle behind the arrangement of ancient sites. His thesis was that prehistoric monuments and shrines, including stone circles, menhirs, dolmens, holy wells, mounds, earthworks, prominent rocks and other spots and landmarks of traditional sanctity, were originally sited in relation to each other on a series of straight lines. On these same lines, which he called “leys” Watkins also found old moated houses, churches and crosses (presumably built on pre-Christian sanctuaries), beacon hills, cairns, paved river fords and stretches of old pathways. In explanation of this phenomenon Watkins suggested that leys were archaic trackways and that the landmarks and monuments aligned on them originally served to guide travellers on the “old straight track”. The purpose of leys was both secular and sacred, for traders and pilgrims alike. At their intersections were held markets and festivals, and the sanctity of these places extended to the other sites in line with them and to the leys themselves. Finally Watkins concluded (in his Old Straight Track, 1925) that the unifying principle behind the ley system was something deeply mystical, relating to a system of ancient magic and religion whose vestiges are to be found in traditional folklore.

BURL
Deeply mystical indeed. Maybe unfathomable. I think I should tell you why I’m so sceptical about leys.

No fieldworker doubts that prehistoric people could set out a series of monuments in straight lines. Anyone seeing a cursus, or the avenue at Stonehenge, or the lines of barrows in the Winterbourne Stoke cemetery knows this. It is not straightness that bothers us but four other problems. The first is obvious. If leys were trackways then prehistoric people were idiots. No sensible person would travel far in a straight line. Even motorways avoid swamps, cliffs and the widest stretch of a river. Every old droveway that we know of followed the easiest route however much it meandered.

The second and the most important objection is to the so-called mysticism of leys. I suspect that ley enthusiasts arrived rather desperately at a belief in this supernatural quality because they could discover no sensible explanation for leys. This, of course, would not be surprising if leys never existed except in the imagination.

Thirdly, archaeologists doubt leys because of the improbable mixture of sites that can constitute a ley, anything from a standing stone to a hillfort to a medieval church. The final objection follows from this. As soon as such an indiscriminate variety of monument is accepted then it becomes statistically likely that sooner or later anyone examining a map will be able to “discover” a ley of three or four places in line simply because the choice of site is so wide. My own very brief study of an Aberdeenshire map “revealed” a straight line of five adjacent mountain tops. Flippantly, one might suggest that this was a trackway for delegates to a summit conference.

MICHELL
No researchers have yet had the wit or computer power to devise a statistical test for the existence of the ley system as Watkins conceived it. But reduced to its simplest terms, to the bare question of whether megalithic monuments, supposed by Watkins to have been the original markers on leys, were deliberately sited on alignment principles, the matter becomes more open to resolution. In The Old Stones of Land’s End I attempted to provide the data, limited to a small area of West Cornwall, to illustrate the incidence there of alignments of three or more megalithic sites. My claim remains that these alignments are too numerous and accurate to be the result of chance. It is also observed that there is another criterion by which the planned nature of alignments can be judged. Each monument in line is placed so as to be visible, often at the extreme limit of sight from its aligned neighbour. The first basic claim is open to statistical testing, and several statisticians of different schools and abilities have in fact addressed themselves to the problem. None of their programmes has really been completed, but all their preliminary results have been generally favourable to, and certainly not dismissive of, the ley thesis. Even Broadbent, who was confessedly inimical to the idea of leys, found a greater incidence of megalithic alignments in West Penwith than he would have expected from chance distribution. In this field there are endless criticisms one can make of any statistical method, but quibbling apart, would you not agree that there is now enough preliminary evidence of megalithic alignments in West Cornwall for the matter to become of interest to professional archeologists?

BURL
I’m glad you mentioned your work in Cornwall because, serious and honest though it is, it perfectly confirms my protest about the farrago of sites that can make up a ley. Despite the title of your book it was not only standing stones that you used. Nor were the other structures confined to early megalithic sites such as chambered tombs and stone circles. To the contrary, you accepted Bronze Age cairns and disc barrows, Iron Age hillforts and courtyard houses, wayside Christian crosses, boundary stones, medieval chapels and churches and then, for good measure, mixed in St Clement’s Isle and the Roskilly Rock. All this, as you remark, in a small area. It is not surprising that Simon Broadbent, the eminent statistician that you mention, ended his analysis by saying, “To sum up, the doubt case …Broadbent’s paper reads “… the doubt case [read cast] originally on the null hypothesis should not …” should not be attributed to the deliberate siting of leys. It is the overall density pattern which we believe accounts for the number of triads (3-site leys) accepted”. In other words, given sufficient sites to choose from “leys” will appear but only by coincidence.

MICHELL
You’re not being quite fair here. My Cornish alignments consist of three or more menhirs or stones of circles which are accepted by archaeologists as more or less contemporary. Where these alignments include other sites such as stone crosses, landmark rocks or old boundary stones, I have noted the fact “for good measure” as you say. The statistical works of Broadbent and others were based on proved megalithic sites only, and in every case alignments were found to be more numerous than random siting would produce. You quote Broadbent’s anti-ley opinion, but that opinion, as he admitted, was not supported by the Land’s End evidence which, as expressed in his figures, was very positively pro-ley. Actually I’m not very impressed by the performances of the statisticians so far. Their methods are still inadequate and they do not take into account features of megalithic alignments which are apparent from inspection, such as the visibility of each site from the next in line. One can see that clearly demonstrated in lines of stones from the St Just and Boscawen-Un stone circles of West Cornwall. A stone of the latter, for example, is one of a precise {15} The irregular lines of stones at Kermario in Brittany. These are part of the larger complex at Carnac where the multiple rows of Menec, Kermario and Kerlescan extend over a distance of two miles. They are not straight.
Copyright: Aubrey Burl alignment of six stones (four upright, one fallen, one removed) over less than three miles. Each would have been visible from the next, except in two cases: and that brings us to one of the most exciting parts of this research, which is that where there are gaps in the chain of intervisibility on an alignment it is possible for surveyors to locate the sites of missing stones. Already in Cornwall several previously unrecorded stones have been discovered by further investigation of established alignments.

BURL
As I have said, there is no argument between us about the existence of ancient lines and rows. For example, there are the three standing stones in line with a fourth in the recumbent stone circle of Castle Fraser in Aberdeenshire about which we have corresponded. This however, does not amount to a ley in the classical Watkins’ sense. Even if such sites are acknowledged to be deliberately aligned it is a long jump from there to the network of long straight tracks which Watkins’ imagination spread over the landscape.

BURL
You are making far too many assumptions. Many, perhaps most, of Professor Thom’s very long sighting lines are now considered doubtful as recent work at Carnac in Brittany, at Stonehenge and in western Scotland has shown. It would be rash of ley hunters to quote them in support of their own theories. Nor is it “certain fact” that churches and shrines were “commonly” sited on earlier hallowed spots. Some were but no one knows how many. It is merely convenient for the ley liner to assume that they form the majority. Despite their usefulness in stretching out a ley for several miles these are unproven locations. A scholar would not accept such problematical markers but, instead, would concentrate on those that are indisputably prehistoric. This would leave only a residue of quite short rows of stones and barrows, too short to be suited to the notions of modern ley hunters with their theories of stone circles as energy accumulators, UFO-nests and so on. There is no reason to believe that a stone row such as that at Ballochroy in Argyll was anything more than a means of combining the midwinter sunset with the burial in the cist and cairn that stood in line with the stones.

BURL
Unfortunately, Lockyer did not always apply rigorous standards when looking for alignments. It is of little relevance to the believer in precise and narrow ley lines to read, for instance, that Lockyer claimed a {16} sightline from the Goon Rith stone to the Merry Maidens stone circle nearby. This “alignment” which, he said, indicated the rising of the Pleiades in 1960 B.C., was supposed to be accurate within a few minutes of arc. In reality, the nearness and width of the stone circle provided an arc of vision nearly five degrees wide, so crude as to be meaningless.

MICHELL
It is strange that you should pick out the line from Goon Rith to the Merry Maidens as an exceptionally poor one. In fact it is well marked. Lockyer identified on it the remains of a holy well to the west of the circle, and went on, rather wildly, to claim that “it cuts across many ancient stones”. He believed it to have been a via sacra. In the Ley Hunter, 93, Alan Bleakley shows that a broken holed stone lies on that same alignment and that to the east of the circle the line touches the site of the ruined Tregurnow stone circle, located in Vivien Russell’s West Penwith Survey at 43752455. The Goon Rith – holed stone – Tregurnow circle line goes through the exact centre of the Merry Maidens. Moreover, John Barnatt in Prehistoric Cornwall (1982) describes another stone he has discovered on that line, standing in the hedge to the east of the Merry Maidens. That makes five megalithic monuments in line – six if you count the possible holy well – over about half a mile.

This emphasises my earlier point that, whatever one thinks about Lockyer’s astronomy, his lines from circles to outliers often extend to other stones in line and are far better marked than he himself realised. There must still be many unknown stones to be discovered by this means of research, and here there is obviously common ground between ley hunters and archaeologists. How do you see this? What, for example, are your current views on megalithic alignments?

BURL
You raise two separate points. First, however many stones have been discovered since Lockyer’s time they would not make his original conclusion any more scholarly. His Merry Maidens line, like many others of his, was poor and imprecise. John Barnatt, whose book you refer to, wrote on page 159 about the Merry Maidens, “Lockyer claimed a number of lines: all could easily be chance”, and “nothing appears to align precisely with the … circle”. Anyone reading Douglas Heggie’s Megalithic Science will know how far from certain many of the more recent claims for astronomical alignments didSentence printed thus. Something omitted between “alignments” and “did”? not exist. But we have to be very critical in our search for them.

Secondly, your use of the word “alignment” is emotive, suggesting as it does a deliberate attempt to lay out a line of monuments in a specific direction. Would we say that a ribbon development of houses along a suburban road was an alignment? Yet this seems to be how the lines of Wessex barrows developed, added to rather casually over the centuries. “Alignment” is not an appropriate term for such complexes.

“Line” is more acceptable and there are plenty of lines in prehistory albeit quite short and rough ones. As well as cursuses and barrow cemeteries there are avenues and there are rows of stones on Dartmoor and in Wales, Ireland and Scotland of slightly different purposes, some astronomical, some directional, some acting as terminal markers.

One site which illustrates the improbability of the mystical ley is the line of gigantic stones known as the Devil’s Arrows in Yorkshire, stones that may, in the true sense of the word, have been aligned on the Thornborough henges to the NNW. This is what Devereux and Thomson claimed in their book The Ley Hunter’s Companion. “It is beyond belief”, they wrote, “that the gargantuan Devil’s Arrows were dragged 7 miles to accidentally sit at the end of a line passing through 4 major henge monuments, 3 of which were indisputably intended to fall on a common line. To claim it as a coincidence would be the refuge of a knave”.

The Devil’s Arrows at Boroughbridge, Yorkshire as drawn by William Stukeley in 1722 from Megalithomania

These are strong words despite the split infinitive. As, however, they were anticipated by nearly twenty years by the archaeologist Nicholas Thomas, who wrote in his Guide to Prehistoric England (1960) that the stones should be “considered as part of the line of sacred sites extending eleven miles to the north” there need be no conflict between ley liners and archaeologists here. {17}

The conflict is over function, not straightness. We do not need to invoke mysticism. Nor is astronomy always applicable. Thom could find only two inexact orientations at the Devil’s Arrows towards Capella and the moon. This negative result, though, does not entitle anyone to assume that the pillars could only be storage units of spiritual energy to revitalise the landscape. There are other more feasible answers.

What is quite apparent is that the Devil’s Arrows, which incidentally are not in a straight line but on a slight curve, stand on a SSE-NNW axis, the same axis as the Thornborough henges, the same axis as the River Swale, the same as Gauthwaite Lake, as the Roman road and even the 19th century railway as it passes the amazingly named Leys Burn. All of them conform to the lie, not the ley, of the land as do many other prehistoric lines, a reason so simple that it is likely that the stones were intended as megalithic “signposts” to the henges.

MICHELL
Until quite recently many ley hunters might have shaken hands with the archaeologists over an agreed package deal which included in some form the principle of megalithic alignments, astronomically directed perhaps, but which excluded several features of the original Watkins theory, such as the idea of long straight tracks originally marking the courses of leys. However, the Watkins fundamentalists have been greatly encouraged by the pictures in Tony Morrison’s Pathways to the Gods, a book which describes the existence of “old straight tracks” across large parts of the landscape of South America. These are actual pathways, kept clear and weeded by local Indians, which run between the native shrines and monuments, linking them in an alignment system on the very same pattern as Watkins’ leys. The comparison is indeed striking. The same types of monuments – shrines, holy wells, cairns and so on – occur on the South American lines as on Watkins’ leys. In fact the South American system is virtually identical with Watkins’s description of leys in Britain. There is even the feature of colonial churches built on the old shrines and thus placed on alignments. Professor Richard Atkinson has objected that the geographical and cultural differences between South America and stone-age Britain make comparisons between the two meaningless: but this seems to miss the point, which is that previously, the most compelling criticism of ley theory has always been its lack of social context. In other words, there was no precedent and no apparent use for a ley system. That criticism can no longer be made. Now that we can point to an actual model of a ley system no one can say that the Watkins picture of aligned sites, linked by straight paths, is unprecedented or unlikely. It is quite possible that future studies of existing cults associated with the use of straight path and site alignments in South America will shed light on the original purpose of leys in Britain.

BURL
As we, in the British Isles, have avenues of earth or stone leading to, or away from, sacred sites such as Stonehenge, Avebury and Arbor Low the idea of processional ways need not surprise us. But by mentioning the American Indian lines you are sidestepping the real issue which is not about straightness but mysticism and the occult. Your British “ley lines” are nothing like the unequivocal desert trackways in Peru or Bolivia. Hilltops and springs have been considered holy places by early societies in many parts of the world and it is predictable that sometimes paths or lines should have been set out to lead to them. The work of American archaeologists such as Zuidema have shown how such paths may have been used. And Maria Reiche, doyenne of research into the Nazca lines, described them as “ceremonial walkways” that may also have had a calendrical use. Some of our own stone avenues may have had a similar function.

But this is not to be confused with the indulgence of plonking together crosses, churches, droveways, stone circles, castles, dewponds and the occasional rock and calling it a ley line for the dissemination of transcendental power. Through an indiscriminate acceptance of any handily-placed site ley liners have imposed a non-existent pattern on the landscape and then, because these contrived lines are otherwise inexplicable, their inventors have asserted that they must be lines of spiritual regeneration. The American lines are homogeneous, linked to known focal points and laid out between 200 B.C. and A.D. 600 in a level, open pebblestrewn landscape. British ley lines are a mixed bag of unconnected sites, of periods separated by thousands of years, leading nowhere except out to sea and occupying a sometimes forested and generally undulating countryside.

One example will show the implausibility of a ley line. On pages 131–2 of their book Devereux and Thomson list the components of their “Silbury Ley”. Readers were told on pages 72–3 that ideally a ley should be no longer than 25 miles, should consist of a minimum of four or five sites and be “as narrow as possible”. Watkins suggested a width of no more than two to four yards but Devereux and Thomson considered that up to eleven yards would be reasonable.

The Silbury Ley extends from Bincknoll Castle at the north to Marden earthwork enclosure thirteen miles to the south. It passes through two henges, a stone circle, Silbury Hill, the Wansdyke and two holy places, an impressive collection of ancient, hallowed shrines.

Why should one question such a compelling ley with no fewer than eight markers? The answer is that the ley lacks reason. The sites do not belong together. The ley is neither straight nor narrow. And it took over four thousand years to construct. The “stone circle” near Beckhampton Penning was not a stone circle but probably a Neolithic mortuary enclosure erected no later than about 3100 B.C. Conversely, the latest sites such as the church at Broad Hinton cannot be earlier than the 9th century A.D. The very name, “Hinton” or “heah-tun”, the “high farm” suggests that there was nothing significant there before Saxon times. And Bincknoll Castle is likely to be a motte-and-bailey of the 11th century, heaped up forty centuries after the first monument in the “ley”.

Despite your interesting comments about the much more cohesive and visually linked Cornish lines, the Silbury sites are not intervisible. Indeed, the ley is remarkable for the fact that very few of the markers can be seen from one another because escarpments and downs obscure the views between them.

The ley is anything but narrow. It passes just inside the eastern bank of Marden, an earthwork nearly 1000ft wide, and through the very western edge of Avebury although that vast ring is 1400ft across. This gives the ley a tolerance not of eleven yards but some 700 yards, wide enough for half a dozen flying saucers. Nor does the line pass through the centre {18} of Silbury Hill and as the stretch of the Wansdyke here is over ten miles long the ley could hardly miss it. No wonder archaeologists doubt the significance of such mixtures of credulity and incredibility. To many of us this is escapism, creating a world that never was, comfortable to the idle-minded because it cannot be disproved despite its numerous improbabilities.

MICHELL
I wasn’t referring to the Nazca lines so much as to those of Bolivia which are straight, long-distance, ritual pathways, linking the very same types of site as are identified on British leys. As to the Silbury ley claimed by Devereux and Thomson, the points where it passes through large sites are marked by special features. I do not agree that there is a latitude or degree of width to a ley. Watkins believed that the course of a ley through a henge or church site was originally marked by a stone or earthwork, and my observation in Cornwall is that stones are aligned precisely, not deviating from the straight line.

Space is getting short, so let me just summarize current ideas on what is behind the ley system. In the late ’60s and early ’70s many people thought that Thom’s astronomical theories would go far to explaining the scientific or practical purpose of megalithic monuments and thus, as far as ley hunters were concerned, the purpose of leys themselves. Yet there are many features of Stonehenge and other contemporary monuments which are not in accordance with their exclusive or even primary use as astronomical observatories. Grinsell’s megalithic folklore collections, for example, give almost no support to the “ancient astronomers” theory. Legends everywhere identify megalithic monuments, as well as the natural landmarks which ley hunters find significant, as places of seasonal magic to which people resorted at certain times in search of cures, fecundity, oracular dreams and other such traditional products of the earth spirit. They are also places of weird events, or wraiths and phantoms and strange experiences. Such experiences continue even today – not mentioned in the archaeological press of course, but reported in the small geomancy and Fortean journals, the Ley Hunter or Fortean Times for example, where one can find modern repetitions of many of the folklore themes relating to ancient monuments. There are many country paths and legendary tunnels often conforming to ley lines, which are similarly associated with seasonal hauntings or manifestations of an unknown form of energy. It seems to me now that the purpose of astronomical features in megalithic monuments was not so much for observation as for reception, implying that astronomical influences played an important part in magic and ritual within stone circles or chambered tombs. There is good authority from classical writers for the suggestion that the overall purpose behind megalithic and later temples was alchemical, to procure the productive fusion of earth energy with the forces of the cosmos. It may be significant that dowsers frequently claim that under or near every megalithic site is a spring or crossing point of terrestrial energy streams.

The association of natural earth energies with megalithic sites is now being demonstrated by the Dragon Project, organised by the Ley Hunter magazine. You probably saw the long article in the October 21, 1982 New Scientist where Don Robins gives proof that “stone circles do indeed emit anomalously high and anomalously low levels of several forms of radiation”. We do not yet know why circles were erected at spots where readings of anomalous energy levels are obtained, but it is at least probable that their builders were aware of those energies, and it is possible that they made use of them for purposes we would now call magical.

BURL
We’re like Sydney Smith’s two housewives shouting at each other from windows on opposite sides of the street. “They will never agree”, said that witty cleric, “for they argue from different premises”. So do we. I look for evidence that can be tested and you supply the “good authority” of unspecified classical writers who, for reasons you do not explain, stated that megalithic sites produced a fusion of earth energy and cosmic forces. As the earliest of these unnamed investigators lived a thousand years after the last megalith was erected in the British Isles it would be interesting to learn who told him what the stones were for. Macaulay wrote the Lays of Ancient Rome but I know of no Roman who wrote about the leys of ancient Britain. As for the Dragon Project at the much-disturbed Rollright Stones, at present the conclusions of Robins are so inconclusive as to satisfy no one.

The King Stone near the Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire. The hollowed side has been caused by people knocking lumps off what they thought was a magical pillar. Members of the Dragon Project centred on the Rollrights claim that “stone circles emit anomalously high and anomalously low levels of several forms of radiation”. In Vol 96 No 1328, 21 October 1982, New Scientist carried a 5 page report on these findings.
Photo courtesy: Aubrey Burl

Unlike ley liners prehistoric people faced honestly the reality of their lives. They suffered more illness than we, died younger, worked under hardships greater than most of us experience, but they must also have laughed, loved, lived optimistically. To overcome the privations of their superstitious world they put up great stones, held seasonal festivals, practised rites of fertility, carried amulets as protection against the feared spirits of the Other-World.

This is not Hobbesian cynicism about the antique past. Unlike ley lines it can be proved. We can still walk among the stones our ancestors raised. Their festivals were recorded by the Romans – though without reference to cosmic fusion. Their talismen and charms of sexual symbolism survive for us to see in museums. Their skeletons exist, bearing the scars of their demanding existence. These were their realities.

It will take more than a pot-pourri of Neolithic, Iron Age and later monuments and natural features to convince me that ley lines offer a more genuine picture of the past than the worn and weathered relics of those distant people. To me ley lines are prime examples of wishful thinking and the “evidence” for them is an insubstantial and implausible as the powers attributed to them. As Emile Chartier observed, “We can prove whatever we want to, and the real difficulty is to know what we want to prove”. □

Living Leys or Laying the Lies?

Further reading