Ghost Paths

'Hilarious and equally awe-inspiring . . . surely his masterpiece' Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth 'A crazy zip-wire ride through the totally wyrd world of leylines and all the wonderful weirdness they have inspired, this is Travis Elborough at his masterly best' Philip Hoare ******* 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 a 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.