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son – on 30 June 1921 to be precise – and looked up to see the ley lines criss-crossing the countryside, lit up like ‘fairy lights’. He regarded them as notches on the hills to allow the Neolithic travellers to find their way from one place to another, as prehistoric trackways, dead straight. They seemed to stretch for miles and align ancient mounds or churches, and for no obvious reasons (one critic made the same case for telephone boxes).
    It wasn’t until 1969 that John Michell bundled the whole idea up with an English version of feng shui, plus geomancy and various other esoteric traditions, and shovelled them into his book
The View Over Atlantis
, and – at one stroke – founded the English tradition of earth mysteries. Soon writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd were exhuming myths of sacred geometry about the alignment of churches in London, the city founded, after all – according to Geoffrey of Monmouth – as the New Troy.
    Mainstream archaeologists still resist the idea and there is little agreement what these alignments actually were – whether they were simple ways of finding your way across dense forest or whether they were some other kind of psychic mystery, or lines of force. Or the roads by which the dead left the world, or the paths by which witches flew. Or the outward manifestations of the energy flows of the earth itself.
    Michell single-handedly added this kind of sacred English exoticism to the hippy and underground movement, popularising Glastonbury as the heart of the cult – transforming a rural backwater into an alternative mecca for the new movement. It was Michell who pointed out the existence of one of the longest ley lines of all, known now as the Michael Line, which stretches from Land’s End in Cornwall all the way to Hopton-on-Sea on the Norfolk coast, in the direction of the rising sun on 8 May (St Michael’s Day) or alternatively on May Day, depending on who you talk to.
    It goes via a whole range of ancient sites, including St Michael’s Mount and the church tower on the tip of Glastonbury Tor dedicated to, you guessed it, St Michael. But it wasn’t for another fifteen years or so before the dowsers Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst took some dowsing rods and traced the line all the way, and found it really wasn’t straight at all – and neither was the so-called Mary Line that intertwined it all the way (see
The Sun and the Serpent
, 1990).
    Dowsing, incidentally, is the skill which usually allows people to sense the whereabouts of water. It is another esoteric – though highly practical – skill which is much used in England, and equally ignored by a sceptical mainstream, though it was declared illegal in 1572 because of supposed links to witchcraft. The fascination with the esoteric in English culture is accompanied by an instinctive fear of anything unusual in its bureaucracies and authorities. The unconventional archaeologist Frederick Bligh Bond lost his job as director of excavations at Glastonbury Abbey when he started using automatic writing – receiving messages from a long-dead medieval monk – to guide his decisions about where to dig.
    Still, whatever ley lines may or may not be, they provide an added layer of deep history – and maybe even deep mystery – which only underlines the sensible respectability of the National Trust or English Heritage. And they’re enjoyable, if only for irritating the English academic establishment, who are no longer able to fall back on witchcraft legislation.
I knew nothing on June 30th last of what I now communicate, and had no theories. A visit to Blackwardine led me to note on the map a straight line starting from Croft Ambury, lying on parts of Croft Lane past the Broad, over hill points, through Blackwardine, over Risbury Camp, and through the high ground at Stretton Grandison, where I surmise a Roman station. I followed up the clue of