Ghost Paths

Wherever you go in Britain, you travel not in three dimensions, but in four. The fourth dimension is the past. Faint traces of a far older world often lie just beneath our feet. Our landscape is haunted, its phantoms omnipresent and our countryside studded with markers of ancient rites and rituals whose meaning and purpose have become hazy with the passing of time. But could there be some underlying pattern to explain the siting of sacred sites? The Herefordshire brewer Alfred Watkins certainly thought so, when in blinding flash on 30 June 1921, he suddenly saw a hidden network of prehistoric tracks - 'a fairy chain' of alignments that 'stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could see' that he called 'leys'. Almost instantly dismissed by the archeological establishment who dubbed Watkins a crank, his idea captured the public imagination and ley hunting became a craze, championed as a new health-giving outdoor activity. His book, The Old Straight Track, would become a bible for those seeking to unlock the earth's greatest mysteries for generations, as others soon saw something occult, Druidic, supernatural and even interplanetary in leylines. In Ghost Paths, Travis Elborough, the award-winning author of Atlas of Vanishing Places, undertakes a spellbinding journey into the esoteric world and the curious life and times of ley lines with Watkins' concept resonating with believers in sunken civilisations and King Arthur's Camelot, Glastonbury mystics, twig-wielding dowsers, UFO-spotters, dope-smoking counter cultural revolutionaries, spiritually-minded festival founders, science fiction writers, outsider artists, furniture designers, underground filmmakers, hippy and post-punk musicians, coastal gardeners and urban town planners. Empathetic and entertaining, this is pop cultural history at its most uncanny, Elborough a spirit guide to a peculiar yesterday that still speaks to us today amid a revival of interest in the wyrd lore of the land.