A Super-Brief Consideration of Straight and Speculative Lines

22 Mar, 2026

I can’t remember what I was reading recently that referred to Alfred Watkins, the British photographer and amateur archaeologist who really brought the idea of ley lines into conversation. At any rate, said reading had nothing to do with new-age speculation or attempted revivals of ancient folkways, so I thought I’d follow up on this guy and his work. What I was curious to know was whether Watkins himself had done anything to encourage the insistence that apparently straight lines running through a number of natural and human-built structures were really sorts of energy paths.

I don’t know why I’ve been relieved to discover Watkins engaged in no such speculation; although the History Channel’s zeal, for example, for seeing aliens behind any number of land markings can’t be traced back to any theories of his, the connections were made nonetheless. His thing, as exemplified in The Old Straight Track, was just seeing lines all over the countryside and thinking about how and why pre-Roman and later Britons might have made paths and erected structures based on sight lines, what I guess you could call an early version of surveying that in Watkins’s view also led to the adoption of particular place and family names. In general, it’s an interesting ball of wax to consider, but one that trained archaeologists and scholars never accepted. (I mean, you can draw lines all over the place and find connections, especially in an environment that’s been host to centuries’ worth of cycles of building and crumbling and new habitation and abandonment.)¹

I want to say I don’t know why the leap was ever made between recreational archaeology and neopaganism or UFO fandom—but then again, if you want to believe something desperately enough, and there’s even a vague hint that a phenomenon or fact could back it up, embracing said thing and giving it your own spin isn’t such a stretch. I don’t necessarily think that’s what’s going on with Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book, Against the Machine, but parts of that volume feel uncomfortably close to ley hunters’ desire-need to hold onto earth energies and the spiritual powers associated with them. Kingsnorth’s much-needed criticism of the ways in which a contemporary über-rationality/tech-centered mindset is driving the planet, and us along with it, into the ground starts, as you go further into the book, to spin off into assertions such as COVID being “a trial run” for the imposition of data-intensive technologies; “the centre of the [present cultural order’s] new ritual year being ‘Pride Month,’ an ever-expanding pseudo-religious festival;” and the emergence of smart computing and AI not as one more human project gone devastatingly wrong, but as the manifestation of some malevolent force being “ushered in.”² Maybe the discomfort in both cases lies in how slippery and hard-to-determine a thing a boundary is between sane, if problematic, thinking and wild speculation that stirs up calls to join in the ultimate battle of Good vs. Evil (calls that all too often end in denigrated groups being hurt in one way or another). And maybe that elusive line is so slithery because it’s a hard thing to consider, much less accept, the possibility that we’re just floating around on an idiosyncratically living planet, and that its, and our, existence doesn’t mean one particular thing or another—doesn’t big-M “mean” anything at all vis-à-vis the rest of the universe. Keeping your wits about you in a vast and empty void is a demanding task for anyone endowed with cognitive capacities.

All that’s not to deny the value of what’s generally called the “spiritual,” which has to find and define the way that boundary works. The good old Scholastics, with their step-by-step logic and use of disputation, often seem to have been concerned above all with finding the right balance between reason and faith. Their work never did much for me, but the drive behind it—to figure out what makes sense to argue or assert based on reason and to what degree we can take anything on credit—will likely be a never-ending endeavor. Well, at least until we totally cede our brains to the Cloud or the Singularity or whatever it is that’s coming to replace us, at which point I imagine there will be lots of walking in formation along particular lines that have been designed just for us.

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