Lines of Sight: Alfred Watkins, Photography and Topography in Early Twentieth- Century Britain

Abstract

Alfred Watkins (1855–1935) (fig.1) originated the idea of ley lines, surveyed alignments which, so he maintained, articulated the prehistoric landscape and movement through it. The idea has its fullest exposition in Watkins’s book The Old Straight Track (1925) with photographs taken throughout his native Herefordshire (fig.2). The search for ley-lines became a cult in the countryside discovery movement of 1930s Britain and was revived with the republication in 1970 of The Old Straight Track with a forward by John Michell, author of The View over Atlantis (1969). Ley-lines became connected with all manner of enigmatic lines in the landscape, such as dowsing lines, feng shui and the patterns scraped on the remote Nazca plateau of Peru. TATE’S ONLINE RESEARCH JOURNAL

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