Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

I think Alfred Watkins must have intuited something, but overlaid that with his own theories because he had no means to trace the actual energies. So he posited straight lines and developed theories to account for them. The Mary and Michael lines mentioned earlier in this discussion do waver and turn quite a lot, though over the course of their journey across southern Britain they follow a more or less direct course, much as some rivers do. So they're lines of a sort, like the line of a river, but they're not straight lines, and drawing straight lines on a map and thinking you've found ley lines is a hit and miss approach that isn't really to be recommended. In any case, you need some way to verify that there's something corresponding to the posited line.

I still think much of the literature is full of fantasy and bizarre guesswork. But in any case scepticism is important when dealing with something this vague and little known - so long as it's balanced and open scepticism and not blank hostility pretending to be cool objectivity.

It may be worth recalling the weird ideas people used to have about electricity and magnetism before modern scientific knowledge developed. The attaching of weird ideas doesn't necessarily invalidate the basic core of observations.

Personally, I'd welcome detailed and scientifically structured research into dowsing in general and also into ley lines.