The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said 'the limits of our language set the boundaries of our world'. This is very relevant to alignment research. Anyone who uses the term ley-lines in archaeological circles immediately loses all credibility.

Nowadays most people who have heard of ley-lines associate them with dowsing and energy lines. The meaning of the word has become so blurred by its many different interpretations that this wonderful part of our heritage has ceased to be taken seriously.
Alfred Watkins never used the term 'ley-line' in his life. He called his alignments leys until 1929, after which he referred to them as archaic tracks.
Unlike Watkins, I cannot find archaic tracks - my alignments cross the Firth of Clyde and the Sound of Bute so they are definitely not tracks. Unlike the dowsers, I am not interested in energy lines either - I am looking for something that can be observed, classified, measured, and mapped - what I find is Prehistoric Site Alignments.

PSAs are simple overland alignments of hilltops and ancient man-made features detected without recourse to dowsing or astronomy. Some are in line of sight between intervisible points, others are connecting lines on different alignments.
Prehistoric Site Alignment-hunting is a clumsy term, so I call the process archaeo-orienteering.

I have found stretches of the Clyde, the White Cart Water and many other rivers that have more sites along their length than any of my PSAs. If I want the complete picture and not just 'the straight line picture' I cannot discount the possibility that these stretches of river also served as communication lines in prehistoric times. The overall effect is that of a giant game of snakes and ladders. Rivers serve as snakes, PSAs as ladders; once you know where they are it all makes perfect sense.

The above photgraph shows Lock Quien crannog on the Isle of Bute (NS 062 593), aligned to Holy Isle off Arran 20 miles to the south, and Dhu Loch crannog and Dunburgidale fort to the north.

Dunburgidale (NS 064 661) fort is classified as a 'galleried dun' because of the chamber in the wall. If you stand on the moorland outside the fort you cannot see Holy Isle, but step up on the ramparts and away in the distance, the highest point of the isle comes into view.
Although they cannot be seen from Dumburgidale, the crannogs at Loch Dhu and Loch Quien are on the same alignment. An important point about this alignment is that the two crannogs on it are believed to date from the Iron Age. The idea of building crannogs (artificial islands) came late in prehistory and earlier occupation of these sites is just not possible. This shows that the custom of using alignments was part of a continuing tradition which does not necessarily date from Neolithic times as most people seem to think.

Prehistoric Site Alignments do not form themselves into a network of tracks, they seem more like a collection of local landmarks with the same hills often used by different communities as a means of finding their bearings using skyline markers. There was no need to follow PSAs across the water or all the way up to the hilltops. Those who use stars for navigation don't have to fly to the heavens to get where they're going either, but they use the same principle.

My research has shown that important sites in prehistoric times were very often placed in alignment between landmarks in the surrounding hills. The most likely reason for this would be to help you find your way back to them through the wilderness.

Obscurities and Objections

How can we tell the difference between a genuine alignment and an assembly of coincidences?
Alfred Watkins arranged 51 churches on the OS map of Andover into 29 three-point leys, eight four-point leys and one five-point ley. To see how many alignments were likely to turn up by chance, he marked out 51 crosses haphazardly on a sheet of paper the same size and found 33 three-point alignments, one of four points, and none with five. He concluded from this that three-point alignments are valueless as proof, while four points or more are exceedingly strong evidence.
The flaw in this apparently logical supposition is that for all we know we are narrowing down our research options because three-point alignments might have been perfectly acceptable in prehistoric times. Some of the churches in the Andover survey could have been like those on Watkins' Oxford map - strung out along main thoroughfares which were more the result of town planning than prehistoric surveying. This would have resulted in a strong bias in favour of the churches over the 51 random crossmarks.

Since Watkins' experiment, ley-line statisticians have concentrated on various complicated formulae to find the 'statistically significant alignment', with the more sites on the line the better. Again, the reasoning behind this is suspect. It almost suggests that the main aim of prehistoric peoples was to cram as many sites into a straight line as possible. The truth is that a single line in isolation doesn't prove very much. For all our calculations, there is still no real way of knowing the difference between a statistically significant alignment and a statistically significant coincidence.

The method that gives me the best results is to isolate an area for research and see where my PSAs originate and where they terminate. I consider three-point alignments quite acceptable if any of the three sites is an intersection on another alignment.
To cut coincidental alignments to a minimum, I chose the worst possible ground in Scotland for my biggest research project. Far from the astronomical alignments of Argyllshire and the Hebrides, further still from Watkins' rural Herefordshire, the City of Glasgow - with its original landscape almost obliterated by 800 years of housing and industrial development - could scarcely be considered a favourable testing ground for an archaeological theory.

Nevertheless, I tracked down every alignment I could find that passed through the city limits. Had my 31 alignments led to places like Hampden Park, Central Station, the Plaza Ballroom and the City Chambers, I would have folded my tent and crept off silently into the night.Instead, they led me into a fascinating interlocking Network dominated by four strategically placed sites, three of which are in perfect alignment.

The results of the research project are fully documented in the Glasgow Network of Aligned Sites web site and in Glasgow's Secret Geometry.
The revised third edition of the book is available for £5.95 from Aquarius Books, 61 Byres Road Glasgow, G11 5RG (Tel: 0141 357 5661)
http://aquariusbooksglasgow.seekbooks.co.uk/

On to Another Time, Another Place.