On 30th June 1921 a Herefordshire businessman, magistrate and photographer had finished his work for the day, and, as the weather was fine, looked at his map for somewhere interesting to explore. He suddenly noticed that several ancient sites fell in a straight line that passed over prominent hilltops. An idea of a system of aligned tracks in prehistory came to him that he was to spend the rest of his life researching in the thorough, precise way that was his nature. He formed an organisation, the Straight Track Club, that was formed of others who had been enthused with the idea, and much work was done consolidating the knowledge of the alignment system, which seemed very wide-ranging.
However, the work was to become "heretical" on many fronts. From the first, it was so to archaeology, changing former views of prehistory, and remains so today even though its revelation of the achievements and status of early culture has been assimilated into it. We no longer have a Victorian view of savage "Ancient Britons". Perhaps it is for different reasons, as in this quotation from Roads and Tracks for Historians, by Paul Hindle:
"...perhaps the most famous is the work of Alfred Watkins (1925), who sought to find natural "ley lines" running through the landscape, giving a network of "old straight tracks". Any objective study of his curious ideas reveals random alignments and associations, and his notions of a race of Stone Age road builders are best forgotten. The very idea that Stone Age men needed sight-lines, markers and cairns is something of an insult to them; they clearly knew their surroundings intimately..." Indeed they did, and the matter is turned on its head with their achievements and knowledge becoming an "insult".
The Straight Track Club continued until the 1940s, then the subject went into a decline, but after the war was revived by Tony Wedd of Chiddingstone, who had an even more bizarre-seeming notion (but one not unknown in the Straight Track Club days, as a manuscript in their folios in Hereford Library shows), that made the subject heretical to scientists other than archaeologists. It was that the lines may not just be sighted tracks, as Alfred Watkins proposed, but lines of an unknown form of energy (which may even have been known and detectable to the early peoples by dowsing or something similar). This may have caused the lines to be held sacred, as the "ceque" lines of the Incas were, and religious structures and tombs could be built on them for this reason.
Coming to even more recent times, the idea of the lines has also become heretical to religious groups, particularly fundamentalist Christian ones, who see the whole thing as connected with "new age" ideas considered contrary to religious doctrine. So there has been an enmity to the idea from the beginning, which has grown and spread as the work on them has grown and spread. This is ironic, because the lines could be the connection and continuity not only between all places and all times, but also between all faiths. This last is expounded in the research project The Hidden Unity.
There have been a number of other significant projects; one was a year-long one at the beginning of the nineties exploring the E-Line, a ley running across the south of England, first found at Pitch Hill near Ewhurst, which seems to be the widest and most powerful so far found. This line was even extended round the world, interesting things found in Nepal and New Zealand, and connections with the well-known St. Michael Line. The two lines cross near St. Day in Cornwall, but as great circles they also cross at Stewart Island, a small island south of New Zealand.
Another interesting find was that widths of leys, which vary from about six paces to the hundred or so paces of the E-line, double at sunrise and sunset. This is the Solar Transition Effect, and the time is about twenty minutes, but was found to be slightly more when measured in the more northerly latitude of Scotland.
The most recent research has been done by Dutch biologist Rienk Noordhuis, who has been interested in the reactions of animals to the leys, and has brought forward a ley structure theory.