Beginnings

In 1971 a friend introduced me to the concept of ley lines, and I was instantly hooked.  It appealed to my love of archaeology and, as a land surveyor, of maps.  Of course, at that time, I had no idea that the subject was anathema to the archaeological establishment.  Having a good selection of one-inch-to-the-mile Ordnance Survey maps, I spent many happy hours with ruler and pencil drawing lines between ancient monuments and churches.  Although most were inconclusive, I noted that some alignments appeared to radiate from a central point, often a church in a town centre. This caused me to wonder if it was possible to discover lines radiating at intentional angles or directions.  I also noticed that some sites were at specific distances from these centres, enabling circles to be drawn passing through several points, thus hinting at the possibility of a common measure of distance.

After a while, I had so many lines and circles drawn over my chosen area of West Surrey that it was apparent that I was getting nowhere, and it became clear that playing about on one-inch maps was a complete waste of time. This scale is far too small and inaccurate to attain an acceptable degree of accuracy.  The relevant detail, such as churches or tumuli, are symbols and therefore not necessarily in their actual position;  for example, a church in the fork of a road junction may be shown many metres back from the junction to fit the conventionalised symbol on to the map;  for this reason, I have found a barrow on the edge of a group of tumuli to be some forty metres out of position. Not only is the detail inaccurate for research, but it is also in short supply.  All churches are shown, but many tumuli and other ancient sites are omitted in the area I have chosen to research.  Considering these factors, it is evident that one cannot hope to get an accuracy of any greater than a band of about 25 metres wide.  This is nowhere near the tolerance acceptable for any serious investigation.

I decided that I needed to determine, if possible, whether it was all hogwash, which seemed at that time to be increasingly likely, or whether there was something to be discovered.  The first step was to choose an area on which to concentrate, and from my study of the one-inch maps around my home town of Guildford, this seemed the obvious choice.  Therefore I purchased enough two-and-a-half-inch-to-the-mile maps to cover an area centred on Guildford from Farnham in the west; Dorking in the east; Woking in the north; and Horsham in the south, covering an area of some twenty miles by twelve.  This area is about as large as was practical working on a full-size drawing board.

The next task was to list all the possible relevant sites.   All known prehistoric sites, all pre-reformation religious sites, and all other historic sites.   Also, some landscape features that might have alignment possibilities.  The total of listed sites reached 80.   The Ordnance Survey coordinates were carefully compiled and listed as an Excel spreadsheet.  Columns were added to allow various tasks, such as plans, photographs, research, and other jobs, to be ticked off once completed.

The paper maps were glued together to form a composite.  Upon transferring the lines from the one-inch to the two-and-a-half-inch maps, it became clear that some of the alignments were not acceptable to the new limits of tolerance, but what was more interesting was that other lines appeared to be an excellent fit.  I spent several months with this map, researching and visiting all the relevant sites. These included all tumuli and other prehistoric sites, and all pre-reformation churches and chapels, wondering at the possibility that they may have superseded pre-Christian religious sites.  But, at this scale, the detail was still tiny, churches still being symbolised, but the alignments and the relationship of sites that were emerging were intriguing enough to justify the expense of transferring the findings on 1-10560 scale representing six-inches-to-the-mile, commonly known as six-inch maps.  A far higher degree of accuracy could now be achieved, but there were still problems.  One is that paper is not a stable base, subject to small expansion and contraction.  Another is the curvature of the earth, the map being a flattened portion of a sphere.  A small deviation will be found over a distance of ten miles, running east to west, meaning that a straight alignment would be very slightly curved when drawn upon an Ordnance Survey map.  The deviation is far less north to south; indeed, it is zero on the central meridian of the Transverse Mercator projection, upon which the Ordnance Survey is based.  This meridian is two degrees west of Greenwich, roughly a line from Bournemouth to Berwick-on-Tweed.

A third problem is that the maps are not as accurate as many people would like to think.  The largest scale Ordnance Survey map is 1-1250, but this only covers urban areas.  The scale covering rural areas is 1-2500. At this scale, the Ordnance Survey does a grand job, but much of the information is derived from ancient editions, and it is not unusual for errors of several metres to be found; for example, the area of Crooksbury Common appears to have been updated using aerial photography.  But the two tumuli (Crooksbury Barrows on the CROOKSBURY LINE) hidden beneath the trees are not visible from the air and so remain in the same position as on the old County editions, with the result that although the surrounding tracks are accurately positioned, the barrows are five metres to the north-west of the surveyed position. Although the errors at the larger scales can be several metres for hedgerows, watercourses, boundaries, etc., it is seen that the errors in solid structures, such as churches, in general, do not exceed one and a half metres.

Eventually, a composite of six-inch-to-the-mile maps was glued together, covering my research area, measuring some nine feet long by five feet wide.  Although I had my own drawing office at home with a four-foot-wide drawing board, this composite was unmanageable and became increasingly creased and dog-eared.  At this time, I had a pattern of alignments centred on Guildford, mainly on five rays radiating from Whitmoor Barrow – the outer rays being almost precisely one hundred degrees apart, the inner rays being sixty degrees apart; and the central ray pointing roughly south.

In 1981 I had a long letter published in ‘The Ley Hunter’ magazine criticising current research standards and suggesting outlines for new, more acceptable criteria.  I requested correspondence from anyone working along similar lines and eventually received a letter from Edward Collier of Ludlow in Shropshire. He used an early home computer to analyse grid references to locate alignments.  A lengthy correspondence ensued, culminating in a computer analysis of all known ancient sites within the selected area.  The most striking aspect of this branch of research was the difference in our approaches to the same problem.  A computer analyst’s approach is primarily statistical, with its nature, archaeological significance, and topography being of secondary interest,  but I felt that although a computer analysis may be desirable in the first instance for a large area, such as a county, it was too objective for a small area; it did not allow for the varying data as applied to different types and sizes of a site when working to a large scale.  For example, it is possible to obtain a round barrow’s coordinates within a metre or two (provided the location is precisely checked by GPS). In contrast, a church assumed to be on an ancient site may be of considerable size, inside a yard of considerably greater size.  It is evident from known instances of barrows associated with churches that the original point of interest may be anywhere within the consecrated area and sometimes just outside.  The conclusion from the above – that only sites contemporary to the period being investigated should be used as primary data leads inevitably to the problem of site relevance, perhaps the greatest and most valid criticism of the theory put forward by detractors of the theory.  (See under the heading ‘Info/The Elephant in the Room).

This was probably the turning point; I decided to take this research seriously, so I formulated a programme of work.   This fell into three broad divisions: gathering relevant data from available sources, the most important being the archives of the Surrey Archaeological Society (SAS) in the library of Guildford Museum.  Secondly, the indoor tasks of plotting and calculating.  And thirdly, field walking, photographing and surveying.  Once this programme was substantially complete, I could begin the task of interpreting, drawing and writing.

Firstly to the museum.  The prehistoric sites listed in the Ancient Monuments catalogue and all locations of known prehistoric activity in the selected area were collected from the Surrey Archaeological Collections and plotted onto the six-inch maps.  Added to this were all the pre-reformation churches listed in Pevsner’s guide to Surrey.  The information obtained was compared with the previously discovered alignments.  Of the 21 churches known to be ancient, nearly half had some significance.  The list of prehistoric monuments was more impressive; of eleven known, no less than eight were on alignments.  I started the mathematical analysis with the rays. I had a large computer-generated protractor printed onto stable drawing film. On the 1-10560 scale plan, I obtained reasonably accurate initial data upon which to base the preliminary plot.

As the rays were lying on ten-degree divisions of a circle, this number was used as the relevant factor, and it was found that the error meaned out over the 100-degree span of the outer rays to only half a degree.  Using this information, a set of map coordinates were calculated for every 9.95 degrees ray from east to west, at intervals of 3600 feet, a unit refined from research (later named by me as the Druid Mile as a convenient handle), down each ray from the base point of Whitmoor Barrow accurate to one metre.  For the required degree of accuracy, it is essential to use coordinates; by having a precise map reference for every point of interest, all the errors probable when drawing lines by hand are ruled out. They enable one to see where each point falls and make the necessary fine adjustments to the angles and distances.  The one error remaining, that of earth curvature, is very slight over the short distances involved here.

In the 1980s land surveying was transformed by the introduction of Computer-Aided Design (CAD), and I experienced a whole new learning curve, but once mastered, a fascinating one.  No more hunching over a drawing board fiddling with protractor and pencil; worrying about small inaccuracies, instead a whole new way of handling data.  It now became evident that the only way forward was to load all my research into a computer database.  All my sites were cut and pasted from the Ordnance Survey using Promap.  This was quite expensive, probably averaging ten pounds a site, so not for the faint-hearted!  Still, as a hobby cheaper than taking up golf.  All the site coordinates were keyed into a master database.  In the picture below, the site plans are all inserted into their correct locations but too small to make out.  The beauty of this database is that it is easy to zoom in to any site and see it full size as reproduced in the site entries of this website.

The above photographs demonstrate how the database in the computer is not restricted by size.  The bottom picture is the base point for the bearing alignments.  It can hardly be seen in the top picture, demonstrating that this work could not be achieved without a computer.

The white linework is downloaded from the Ordnance Survey.  The blue circles are coordinates logged from the handheld GPS.  Green lines are bearing alignments.