Even skeptics admit some ley lines may be intentional (see Ancient Mysteries ), but caution of all the bizarre side trips some take. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more thoroughly investigated than in the British Isles where they have become known as Ley Lines. Thom lent the idea of leys some support; in 1971 he stated the view that Neolithic British engineers would have been capable of surveying a straight line between two points that were otherwise not visible from each other.

Suddenly, the conservative miller from Hereford morphed into a countercultural visionary, a prophet of the Age of Aquarius. He does speculate that the ley-men, surveyors using twin poles to lay out their routes across the landscape, were seen as seers of some sort because of their near-magical powers (he imagined the famous chalk Long Man of Wilmington to be an image of a ley-man) and that superstitions built up around way markers as the paths themselves fell into decline.

Nevertheless, the story of his book is a salutary one, reminding us that the best journeys never go to plan and that the most interesting destinations are provisional.

And Mitchell’s decision to place the tor at Glastonbury at the centre of his network, the capital of his sacred landscape, is still played out most summers on the Eavis family farm.For many ley hunters, this Neolithic period was seen as a golden age in which Britons lived in harmony with the natural environment. It gives a detailed history of the subject from its Edwardian roots, through the hippy revival of the 1960s and 70s, to the rational and multidisciplinary approach of the late 1990s. Much has been written about ley lines, but amid the sacred energy, UFOs and levitating boulders, it’s sometimes forgotten that the phrase was coined by a modest man who believed that ley lines were simply ancient trackways. Crawford filed these letters under a section of his archive titled "Crankeries" and was annoyed that educated people believed such ideas when they were demonstrably incorrect. Although he created a network of ley hunters, the Straight Track Club, to expand on his work, Watkins was never able to convince professional archaeologists of the merits of his system; there are just too many approximations that have to be made to get monuments to fit in for the ley theory to be entirely convincing.

Remembering [ley lines] exist is a way for us to find stillness and quiet, and to see the earth as animated. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Being of a decidedly non-mystical cast of mind, I found myself drawn to the book’s practical and methodical direction. As Hutton observed, a belief in "ancient earth energies have passed so far into the religious experience of the 'New Age' counter-culture of Europe and America that it is unlikely that any tests of evidence would bring about an end to belief in them.In this book, Michell promoted the ancient astronaut belief that extraterrestrials had assisted humanity during prehistory, when humans had worshipped these entities as gods, but that the aliens left when humanity became too materialistic and technology-focused. The book was disregarded by archaeologists but saw a resurgence of interest with the rise of New Age ideas in the 1960s. Michell's publications were accompanied by the launch of the Ley Hunter magazine and the appearance of a ley hunter community keen to identify ley lines across the British landscape. Some maintained that even if the presence of earth energies running through ley lines could not be demonstrated with empirical evidence and rational argumentation, this did not matter; for them, a belief in ley lines was an act of faith, and in their view archaeologists were too narrow-minded to comprehend this reality. According to his account, he was driving across the hills near Blackwardine, Herefordshire, when he looked across the landscape and observed the way that several features lined up together.

Another prominent ley hunter, Bob Trubshaw, also wrote several books on these subjects and served as a publisher for others. The historian Ronald Hutton similarly noted that there had been a "virtual demise" in the idea by the 1950s, in part due to "a natural weariness with a spent enthusiasm". He viewed archaeologists as antagonists, seeing them as the personification of the modern materialism he was railing against.But in many ways, for the artist, the journey is ongoing, still sending out its tendrils between myth and history, past and present, the human and the more-than-human.