Yorkshire Ley Lines

Yorkshire Ley Lines

Ilkley Moor is about 20 miles northwest of Leeds. The bus from Headingley along the Otley Road takes about an hour. When I was a student at Leeds University in the 1970s it was an easy escape from the grime of the city, to breath in the fresh air of the Yorkshire moors.

I wasn’t much of a walker at that time. The countryside near Birmingham where I grew up was farmland with restricted access. There were no wild bits. The woods were small, usually fenced off, unless they had been designated parkland like the Lickey Hills. My companion, Gillian, came from Manchester where the moors were in easy reach. It was her idea to stretch our legs in the Yorkshire hills.

I am grateful for that introduction. Nowadays, I walk whenever I get the opportunity and I have a regular date with Robin, with whom, over the last fifty years I have trekked across Britain and Europe covering hundreds, if not thousands, of miles.

It was not just the exercise which appealed. I discovered landscape. I continue to be astonished by the variation and diversity even in this small island. I wonder at the smallness of myself, a miniscule dot between the mass of the Earth and the infinite skies. I am exhilarated by the panoramas and the open horizons.

I heard about ‘ecology’ when studying botany for my ‘A’ levels. This was long before it was used as a marketing ploy for detergents and toilet paper. On the Yorkshire hills you could see ecological processes at work, the interactions and connections between living and non-living, and the movement of energy, water, nutrients and species.

Someone came up with the idea that the Earth was a self-regulating ‘organism’. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis would later publish their ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, named after the mythical primordial goddess of Earth. Whilst this was seen as an eccentric view, it opened the eyes (of some of us) to the dangers that the Earth and its diverse species are in danger of extinction due to human actions.  

I wanted to discover more about the natural history of humans. We may think that we have shaped and controlled the world for our own purposes, but our forebears were subject to the environment, its seasons and its vagaries. In the 1970s, forgotten ideas about stone circles, Druidic ceremonies, and life before we were ‘civilised’ by the Romans were resurrected.

One intriguing notion came from a book about ancient trackways published in the 1920s called The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins. He explained how those tracks could still be followed today if you knew how to look for the signs. Ancient burial mounds, sacred sites, geological features, ponds, woods etc could be plotted in straight lines across the countryside. There were clues in the old names of places.

Watkins called these ‘ley lines’. I tried it myself with an OS one inch map of Leeds and Bradford. On areas of open moorland, it was possible to draw straight lines which passed through several features. I went out to check for myself, walking along the lines I had plotted. Just outside Harrogate, following a line I had drawn connecting hillocks and other features, I found myself walking along an ancient ditch which was not on the map. Had I discovered a genuine prehistoric trackway?

On social media, the home of eccentrics and barmy theorists, you can, inevitably find people who do think that ley lines exist. Rather than merely trackways, some suppose that they are ‘energy lines’ which can be followed with crystals or divining rods. If ley lines existed, explanations would be simpler without the need for wishful thinking.  

I now accept that it is possible to take any map and be able to draw straight lines through several random marked points. Despite plotting lines myself, I admit that there is no proof that there are such trackways. But, would it not be marvellous if it were true…