Leyline Quest: Confessions of a New Age Publisher

In 1976 I tried out Watkins' theory on my annual holiday. The end result was a map of alignments that zig-zagged across Central Scotland from the Kilpatrick Hills to Arthur's Seat. A redesigned version of the map accompanied by a brief plagiarised history of British alignment research went on sale in 1977 and half-a-century behind England, Scotland got its first book on ley-lines, Forgotten Footsteps. It could truthfully have been described as a crime against archaeology, but it sold well and financed further research.

The new generation of researchers had rejected the idea of leys as trackways, but were still finding them. Some postulated they were underground water lines which could be detected by means of dowsing rods, some interpreted them as psychic telegraph wires, and some claimed they were navigational aids for UFOs. I had no personal experience of any of this so my little booklet was a compendium of other people's ideas.
You can be an amateur archaeologist, an amateur artist, and an amateur photographer, but there is no such thing as an amateur publisher. Books are made to sell. Watkins might have visualised 'a fairy chain of sites stretching from mountain peak to mountain peak', but I was a bit more commercially minded. With 2,000 newly printed books under the bed, I focussed my thoughts on a fairy chain of bookshops stretching across Scotland through Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Stirling.

The main selling point was the map. It was more a record of my travels than anything else.
Click here for a look at the Leys of Central Scotland, chart one.

One of the shops that sold my books was Bell, Book and Candle, next to the office of the East Kilbride News. Someone in the paper read the book and wrote an article about it. Thirty-four copies sold the next weekend and suddenly the book was on its way. In the weeks that followed, letters to the editor began to appear in the same newspaper and this, too, helped sales.
Nothing I have written since has been so poorly researched or so profitable.

During the summer of my alignment research, I was quite surprised by the amount of castles I found that were built on prehistoric sites. Even shortbread box picture castles like Eilean Donan and Edinburgh occupy Bronze Age sites.
In Argyllshire, many of the oldest castles occupy Iron Age duns (Dun is the Gaelic word for 'fort'). Some of these old sites seem to have the facility of storing and transmitting images from the past to those who are capable of receiving such images. Most of the castles on these sites are haunted by glaistigs, or fairy women, and some seem to be connected by ley lines.
This intrigued me, so my next literary project was to cram 50 ghost stories into a 48 page Guide to the Haunted Castles of Scotland. It was published in 1981 and reviewed in The Ley Hunter No. 97. If you are interested in ghostly schaddois of auld and grisly dedes, click on the Haunted Castles page.