I'd heard that ley lines converged on the point of gullibility? BTW I met Jeremy Hardy once when I delivered a package to his flat back in the day despatch riding in London.
As a walker/rambler over many years, I noticed that in parts of Sussex, one would find features that lead to a belief there was something of interest happening. Whilst studying the local OS maps I noticed that heading from the Long man of Wilmington heading towards Worth Saxon church at Crawley there were repeating features. Firstly farms called Coldharbour each about a day's walk apart. the next feature was ponds with islands in the middle of them. Also, many of the churches along the route were churches with spires and not towers; allowing that back in Saxon times most of Sussex was a forest large one can assume that the spire would act as a guide. Personally, I don’t think many of these features we see have anything to do with ley/energy lines but the result of many centuries of people moving about the countryside.
We have to consider how people transversed the countryside back in the day without any aid other than the sun. .. Even Stonehenge is aligned with the rising and lowering of the sun..in certain positions.. .. Most churches were built on a N-S pole orientation and yes, spire or towers were erected to make it easier to locate them. .. Again no aid other than the sun. Or a tall structure. . Most of these ancient sites/buildings most likely align on a N-S pole tragectory, influenced by the rising and setting of the sun.
The problem with drawing straight lines on maps is that the earth is spherical. Map makers use various techniques such as Mercator's projection (1512 -1594) to replace the curved surface with a flat one around a tube. This means, in essence, that maps are distorted and inaccurate over distance. If Ley lines were magnetic force-fields then they ought to curve outwards from the poles of the earth, rather like iron filings around a bar magnet. As far as I am aware, claimed Ley lines don't look like that.
Exactly right. The difference between a Great Circle route and a Rhumb Line. However, the difference between an ocean crossing and pointing to the church in the next village two miles away is rather different.
They need to let the crow decide as he goes as one flies. A straight line to start that overrides how man's limitations fail to accurately depict anything truely.
In defence of Alfred Watkins, didn't he conclude that the old straight tracks he identified were simply a way of navigating a landscape that was more heavily forested in earlier times, trade routes and the like? The mystical baggage came much later and from others.
and quite boggy, too. Wasn't half of England marshland only a thousand years ago? Long enough for the significance of safe, if lesser used, passages to fade from memory. It would be neat to compare maps of those times and the ley lines maps.
Actually, with all the forests, marshes, hills and at that time much less passable terrain in general, the fastest route between two places was rarely a straight line. Rather, it would be a meandering route through the most passable corridors between places. That's why, up to the Romans (who were the first to do some landscaping and even they would go around significant obstacles), roads would not be straight at all.
I think it's rather simple. People want to find meaning, hidden meaning is even better. Historical isn't enough, and personal meaning isn't respected enough, so they want magical meaning. If we respected more what people see in old monuments and landscapes, what it looks like to them, what it evokes to them, then I'm certain that we'd have suddenly a lot less magical beliefs. Something is sacred or special because of people, and we tend to forget that. I think it's still important to not that charlatanism isn't just about believe in ley lines, it's also about exploiting naive people. I don't think it's fair to just present this belief as something perfectly genuine. There are people who sell their beliefs. It's not about mocking the naive people, it's about condemning the people who exploit them.
Yeah its like Ive known people who do water dousing along ley lines, friendly normal curious people who tried a thing they thought sounded interesting and they had fun with it. Then there are people who sell water dousing courses or offer paid expertise on ley lines to local developments however, they arent the same
Growing up on a farm, i accepted dowsing to find water pipes/ springs as fact. Because we used it to do our work and it saved me countless hours of pointless digging as we found the original pipes, springs or buried leats first time. It was only when I got to university that I realised others didn’t use it or questioned it.
Animals too are supposed to know where to dig for water. It would be possible for a serious and unbiased study to prove or disprove that dowsing works. I am open to believing what you say but require solid proof. Were there cases where water was not found?
Yes, dowzing is something that seems to work and can't be explained. The well on my property was dowzed and is a very good well! Some people seem to be able to do it, others can't! I certainly cant!
@@philipsmeeton In south Devon the is a company that drills bore holes for water , that is located by dowsing , before drilling they will tell you the depth of the water level and the flow rate and extraction rate.😊
Great episode. I was aware that Greggs has a spiritual significance for many, but was unaware that this was taken into account when the company chose their locations.
When I did my PhD I had to give regular progress presentations to departmental staff on my progress. I was modelling molecular interactions, and presented a paper on how the two results I had so far produced fell on a straight line; then at a subsequent seminar at _the Fenton_ I explained why the third measurement was an outlier.
Yes, but that third measurement still fell on the graph paper. You really needed a fourth data point to show that even a flat 2 axis plot can be a bad fit. (-:
Many years ago¹, when the internet was all text, I read a paper about ley lines². It was a mathematician who admitted that he wanted it to be true, so wrote the paper to show how unlikely these straight lines between old structures would be. His conclusion, as you found with Greggs and Matt with (IIRC) old Woolworth's shops, is that straight lines pop up all the time amongst a random collection of points. Great video - keep up the good work! ¹ I nearly started "once upon a time" but that might have suggested that I made this up. ² I have tried to find it again but without success - too many newer ley lines posts, I suppose. Or it might well have disappeared at some time in the last 20-odd years.
There's yhe whole thing about ideas that go in and out of fashion. But, the other thing is, eerie-ness is kind of great when you're wandering around someplace, especially a place that's new to you.
its line of sight i live on a farm in east sussex below a bronze age causeway camp i have very dense woods on the farm in summer you cant see above ferns and canopy so you use a high point on the downs you pick on your route and follow it straight and low and behold you spot churches abbys hillforts all line up its pure accident by virtue of terrain
Mesolithic and neolithic peoples began to guestimate the size of the earth,from mathematical truth's of the proportion's and distance's of the moon relative to the earth and sun(astro archeology)they realized the moon's shadow travelled at a certain speed and during an eclipse exactly covered the sun being exactly 1/400th the distance to the sun,and the moon being exactly 1/400th the distance to the sun,giving away the exact circumference of the earth proportionally.to prove this they used ropes at a given(predicted eclipse)to measure the circumference of the earth in exact straight line's using shadow sticks ,,,where upon they built the first megalithic structure's all over the planet as marker's.bit by bit with rope's,shadow stick's and astronomical observances structure's and triangulations between them(wobbling planet(26k year's)they extended their knowledge to prove the true size of the earth from every continent and country.and people wonder why there are straight line's,this amaze's me
Matt Parker did that. If you search for his name, "Woolworth" and "ley lines", you'll find the map and an explanation in a 2010 post on the "bad science blog".
When I was studying landscape archaeology, we were encouraged to consider why all the famous archaeological sites were clustered in certain areas. We came up with all sorts of possible reasons about the topography, climate, water sources etc. It was only when a map of such features was overlayed with the principal residences of the most eminent antiquarians that it became clear...
Co-incidentally, out of curiosity I'm reading Watkins' 'Old Straight Track' - the cosmic energy stuff wasn't 'til the 60s. Yesterday our neighbour said he'd just found a water leak (underground) - he works for Severn Trent, often as a dowser. We tried it as kids and I could do it, much to my brothers' annoyance, having found various drains & water pipes. Were beacons lit on the hills to guide travellers? smoke by day, was the light reflected in 'dew' ponds along the way. Churches built on earlier sacred ground, yew trees, yet tumuli often found on the edge of a parish boundary. I'm enjoying finding out about such places, visiting the Carnac alignment was much more impressive than Stone henge - I'm old enough to know I won't know why somethings just don't add up, keep an open mind...
As a digger driver, my divining rods are as important in my tool box as my grease gun. Mine are very similar to the rods that you were using, accept mine are just two bent bits of fence wire. For over forty years now, I will walk a grid pattern with my rods across the area were I have been asked to dig. What I think I find is "ground disturbance", because it doesn't matter what I find, weather it be an old wall foundation, a water pipe, a drain or a phone/electric cable. I always find whatever it was that I detected, although I never know what I have detected until I dig it up, with one exception, I sometimes can guess walls if I find corners. Don't for one second think that I am dissing your guest, far from it, I once watched a guy use a hazel twig to find a suitable site for a well, and then he turned round and told me how deep to dig, he was accurate to about a foot. Incidentally I tried to divine the underground water source and couldn't find it. Divining fascinates me, as I can do it and I can trust it, but I have no idea how it works.
I think it is best to be tuned-in naturally. I had tried metal rods once, and got a reaction. An oak tree with 7 trunks, within feet of a crop circle in Cornwall, and standing at the outside edge of the leaves, I could rock back and forth half an inch, the rods would instantly cross, and I would feel a milld electric shock seek to ground through my leg. Then sometime later, I was in a field in Cornwall. I bent down to pick up an unusually-shaped white field crystal. It fitted perfectly in my hand, and as I lifted it, it headed "by itself" straight up to the Sun, strongly spiralling as it did so, before dropping to Earth to ground. By "strongly", my hand was practically spinning off! Then it returned to waist height, gently oscilating left to right. Irealised instantly that I had been handed a merans to dowse. / Within a couple of weeks, I realised I did not have to hold the stone. Having stated what I was looking for, and opened up the energy, by pointing to the Sun, with a quick spiralling to connect, the hand drops to waist height, and a right or left oscillation /spin tells me which way to go. It is a very fast technique for dowsing, as it takes you directly to your target. None of this walking up and down until a rod crosses or a pendulum swings. On arrival, I feel a very strong downward spiral - hard to miss! /
It was a digger driver who taught me 60 years ago, when I saw him trying to find a pipe on a building site opposite my home. He dug down to it, and he found it alright: Being on a hill, it erupted a fountain of sewage. Not all diggers had a cab in those days, so he got showered in sh!t. Thus I have found a water-pipe a yard underground in the middle of a field, digging a hole just 18 inches wide to connect to it. But you are right - dowsing finds ground disturbance, so it is useless at my former market gardens, where there are current and disused heating, irrigation and drain pipes a-plenty.
All double-blind scientific research indicates "dowsing" works at a rate no better than chance. Gonna go with the science rather than one random story.
As another digger operator, I also use divining rods to find water pipes with a very good success rate, I use copper rods with two pieces of water pipe over the handle ends to restrict cheating and it takes out the human ability to hold metal wrongly, I can't explain how it works ,it just does for me, my brother tried it and had no luck go figure!
I used to work for Rolls-Royce (aero-engines!) before I retired and back in the late 1980s I was involved in a big rig test at the Hucknall airfield site that was to use a very big electric motor that had been installed during WW2 and not used since. There were no records of where the power lines ran underground - understandably, as there were other priorities at the time. I attended regular progress meetings and was astonished when the sub-contractors said they were using a diviner to find the underground cables so they weren't damaged during the construction of the rig. These are two very serious engineering companies, RR and the sub-contractors, and not noted for woo or magic. They found the cables, so I assume the diviner did his job! We experimented ourselves in our lab using rods like the ones Paul used with intermittent success. I remain a sceptic, so far. Loved the Greggs example! It shows you have to be careful trying to draw conclusions without a LOT of research.
Dowsing is used by mining & oil companies, & especially water well drilling companies. Drilling dry hole is very expensive & they have simply found it works & saves them money & improves results. I was very amused once when we needed to reroute a water pipe. The guy from Yorkshire Water came out in his van, casually took a pair of dowsing rods out of his pocket, & told us to dig here, here, & here! He was spot on. I've successfully found a buried water pipe too to a 6 inch accuracy too.
Bizarrely as you held up the map in the car, I said to myself...Greggs shops... Im now looking at setting myself up as a psychic, a new life and business awaits me!
@@grannyweatherwax9666Morrisons. "Have I Got News For You" once had a peice where they showed some very interesting geometric lay lines in Northern England. The punchline was that they were all Morrisons supermarkets in a certain area.
As an experiment, you could take a compass back to where the rods moved, and see if the compass needle would move when you walked to the spot that the rods moved.
Or attach an inclinometer to the person's hands, to see if they were tilting the rods so they would fall to one side. This could be completely unconscious and the person may believe he was detecting some form of mythical "energy", you could tilt your hand ever so slightly that you wouldn't be aware of it, but the rods would turn nevertheless. Depending on how you hold them, the rods could be in an unstable equilibrium so the tiniest amount of tilt would make them turn 90 degrees to the side.
@@pwhitewickThere's research out there on what actually goes on as well as plenty of double blind tests which disprove water divining et al. And on a side point Jamie Hyman of Mythbusters fame once disappointingly refused to test any of this nonsense on the grounds that the results might upset the people being tested.
@@pwhitewick Yes... but as someone with a degree in Physics, I'm much more inclined to believe successful detection is a currently unknown property (or heightened sensitivity) of the dowser's personal bio-chemistry, than a purely physical effect such as magnetism.
“An experiment can be considered a success if you have to discard no more than fifty percent of the data points in order to achieve correlation with the desired results” or something like that. Also “correlation does not imply causation”.
An experiment is only a 'success' if it the result is substantially greater than its original probability estimate. That's why science is not about confirmation bias.
Here in western Canada, dowsing is a commonly used method of locating underground water for drilling wells. I've seen it myself and heard quite a few stories verifying its use.
How many times has it not worked? And more pointedly, how much effort was put into getting a sufficient random (unbiased) sample of 'stories' that were not just anecdotal? Water dowsing never holds up under such conditions.
It works because water is literally EVERYWHERE in the ground. In places in Canada, precipitations are high enough that the ground water table is fairly close to the surface. But the GWT is not "localized" in specific points. It's literally underlaying the *entire* landscape.
There's yet to be anyone who can prove that dowsing works under scientific conditions. I know a few folk that said it did seem to work, even though they were aware it's not a proven method to find water, or gold etc.
Growing up in the 1970s, there was a lot of the new-age, crystals and ley lines stuff going on and, being fascinated in ancient monuments since I was a little kid, I kinda got drawn into it all. And we had TV shows like Children of the Stones and all, so it was all part of the zeitgeist. Plus, my father, who was a surveyor by trade, and a very scientific man by nature, used to use dowsing rods to find underground water, and seemed to be fairly successful at doing so. Older and more sceptical nowadays, I find myself thinking as you do. As a side note, I remember many years ago chatting to an old chap in a pub in the Avebury area. He told me he'd lived in the village all his life, having been born there about 20 years BC. "BC?", I enquired. "Before Crystals", he replied without batting an eyelid.
Fun Fact 2: The Old Straight Track is the second studio album by the British folk rock band Jack the Lad, released in 1974. Jack the Lad was formed by former members of Lindisfarne after that band's initial split, and they carried on a similar blend of folk and rock influences, with a more pronounced focus on traditional British folk styles. The album's title references Alfred Watkins' 1925 book The Old Straight Track, which discusses ley lines-ancient, straight trackways said to connect various historical and spiritual sites across Britain. This theme aligns with the band's interest in British history and folklore, often reflected in their lyrics.
@ that’s brilliant. Jack the Lad was my first live gig. Top Rank in Cardiff. Also when Lindisfarne reformed they were playing darts in The Old Arcade before the Cardiff gig. Had a pint with them!
Indeed a brill contribution to UK folk rock, they shared producers with Lindisfarne. Also study the cover art for the Albion Band ...Prospect before you ... its a cartoon style landscape with a surprised viewer spotting the lines in landscape. Ley lines are not lines of mystery energy.
I dont know if its connected, but the 1920's was the era when radio technologies started to appear for the man in the street- invisible signals travelling in straight lines from hill tops and tall structures. Maybe the inspiration for the interest in energy lines comes from this.
Apparently he just saw some lines - pathways - in the landscape. They connected some ancient sites with each other and some churches. Actually it isn’t more than this.
I suppose - But I think the idea of straight lines came a bit before that! Although straight lines in our landscape are often not very practical, having a guide as you hike over hedges and climb thru ditches at night would be some help in finding the way.
I read a book called; ' The Pattern of the Past' by Guy Underwood . In this book he says how he discovered by dowsing that many ancient sites were built over fields of energy or Ley Lines, and if you connected these sites they revealed a line of energy across the country. Not that the energy is in a straight line as claimed here, but at sites that connected in a straight line. One of the sites he mentioned was Glastonbury Tor and once when I visited it, there was guide telling all the stories connected to the Tor including that it was built on a Ley Line. He then produced some dowsing rods and asked if any one would like to try them. Someone from the crowd came forward and held the rods as instructed and walking from the tower in a straight line, at a certain point the rods crossed much to the surprise of everyone present particularly the guy who was holding them.
@@helenswan705 Yes most likely they can, because dowsing is a fact and it's been used for thousands of years to detect water sources. It's all related to the earth's magnetic fields which even dogs can detect, thats why they walk in circles before defecating, they are actually aligning themselves with this energy field.
One caveat regarding the line of St. Michael sites: a straight line on a 2-dimensional map becomes a curved line when projected onto a globe. Straight flights from one city to another appear as arcs and curves when plotted on a flat map. Therefore, what appears on that map to be a straight line, when taken into three dimensions, suddenly isn't. As Marq pointed out: we are pattern-seeking mammals; this is why we see shapes in clouds, faces in woodgrain, shapes in television static (for those old enough to remember that).
The St Michael sites are still aligned, albeit on a curve. What you're really saying is that ley lines should not naturally be straight. We already know that through electromagnetism.
@@WaterShowsProd Actually, I was intrigued by the Mont St Michel bit. My own hypothesis is that structures were built along geological lines and hilltops which were used for bonfire beacons before the digital age. . Lot of room for nonsense tho.
Way back as a young teenager in the 60's/70's I read a book about UFO incidents. A common experience was that cars would stop and the engine cut out. This was stated to have happened to different cars at various times. The phenomenon was part of Roy Neary's fictional experience in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". The suggestion in the book was that deposits of magnetic lodestone lay close to the surface of the road. This affected the steel components in the ignition system. If true, it would affect metal divining rods, if made of a magnetic metal. Having said all that, I believe the ancient peoples built Stonehenge and the pyramids using experience, mathematics, and the ability to focus on a problem or project without distraction. Just as Brunel and Telford built incredible structures in the 19th century. Even with computers, I think it is staggering that French and British engineers built the Channel tunnel, starting at each end and meeting in the middle, under the sea, less than a foot adrift (if you pardon the phrase). We underestimate our own abilities as a species far too often
Monuments such as Stonehenge would have been built first prototyped using wooden stakes and then these replaced by heavier things. Stones last a long longer than wooden poles or tree trunks therefore replacing wooden henges with stone is a very natural and obvious process. The effort required to do this and to fit them all together, that's something else entirely.
This was a good, balanced look at the subject. Good work Paul! I've read Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track and I didn't get the sense he was trying to assign any mystical or paranormal meaning to the fact that ancient points of interest sometimes had routes between them which were straight lines. The central thesis to me seemed to be simply that in an era when there wasn't much concern over land ownership, it made sense to take the most direct route between two points (barring, occasionally, significant obstacles in the landscape). That notion is uncontroversial for Roman roads, so it doesn't seem so contentious to me that civilisations a bit before that may have come to the same conclusion. The more mystical side to it came, as you pointed out in the video, with people like John Michell in the 1960s. I actually thought Watkins came across as a pragmatist though. Perhaps he was occasionally a bit over zealous in looking for those patterns once he got that bug, but the core idea he espoused really didn't seem to be anything more far fetched than the idea that if you need to get from A to B, the shortest route is a straight line.
his book was brilliant for making you realise the pre Roman people of this land had already laid out pathways to get from A to B and for example made notches in hills to aim for if you wanted to go to a specific place to get a specific thing. He thought the Romans when they came probably used roads already there. I liked his theory why a snail is called a "dodman" in some dialects because they carry "surveyors poles" on their heads and a dodman was someone who surveyed pathways. The Long Man of Wilmington could be one of the surveyors with his two poles
I was freaked out when someone told me that if you pick any three churches on a map they will always make a triangle. It was true, and a bit spooky for about 20 seconds.
@@JdeBP My Memory from 2010/2011 is apparently blurry ... Matt Parker wrote the Woolworths Leylines site for Ben Goldacre in 2010 ... and Tom Scott did a leylines postcode finder that did a similar thing in 2011....
Big upsurge in interest in the 60's... & then another in the 90's? Of course there's no relationship to psychtropic substances. Unless you count a Greggs Chicken & Mushroom Bake.
Humans are quite good at finding patterns (but seemingly not good at applying critical thinking when examining why they exist). And we seem to yearn for higher meaning. Put those two together and you explain a large portion of the woo and other BS out there.
For 51 years James Randi ran a paranormal Challenge. It started out as a $1,000 price to people who could show their paranormal ability. Over the years that price went up to One Million Dollars and nobody ever claimed the price. The challenge ended in 2015. Why wouldn't even one of the millions of paranormal practitioners in the world step up and claim the price in 51 years? They all claim it's real but nobody were ready to earn 1 million Dollars although pretty much every one of them takes money from their victims. There have been published countless books explaining different paranormal fields, and yet non of those authors ever claimed the price. This should be an easy task, as they claim to understand and prove the existence of their paranormal field. It should have been like picking up a million dollars of the ground for them, but nobody bothered to do it. Why wouldn't any of them take the money? The Nobel committee have no problems finding several candidates every year within a narrow field of the sciences, but the vast number of paranormal fields can't produce even one in 51 years? It would have blown the Nobel price out of the water, but somehow nobody were interested? Sorry, but I find it extremely hard to believe.
@@stuartd9741 I think it is as 'paranormal' as all the other effects since it isn't real. The other day I overheard someone say they have a chiropractor that uses muscle testing and can see auras. Might as well add he could float in the air. I used to believe in a lot of these things but I kept looking into it and it is all bogus.
@@stuartd9741 It was included in the paranormal Challenge and there is no established normal explanation to it. Dousing rods was part of a few thousand of the failed attempts to win the challenge and non of them passed the threshold for pure chance. So yes dousing rods, are paranormal as in beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Saying otherwise would be a lie.
7:30 shows the problem with dowsing rods quite clearly. It may feel like you're holding them out straight, but gravity is a thing, and levers are, too.
Hedley Thorne has taken over RUclips today! Three videos! I wasn’t aware there was another resurgence in ley lines, but I do get quite frequent comments about them on my videos. Typically people complaining that I didn’t consider them. If I remember correctly, Watkins didn’t talk about energy lines - he was of the view that ancient sites were connected by straight routes. In his day, the critics debunked his arguments based on the huge discrepancies in the ages of the linked sites. A Medieval church and a Neolithic henge, for instance. I struggle with Watkin’s routes and I struggle even more with the energy lines concept.
Back in my hippy days of the 60s I remember some of my friends got into this leylines thing. I also remember thinking if you made a map of sites that were NOT on leylines what would that give you? Are those sites to be regarded as errors or could you find patterns in them anyway? I blame the Victorians, who became obsessed with pseudo-spirituality, pseudo science and pseudo intellectualism, eventually resulting in the made-up world we live in today.
Another thought crossed my mind seeing this: Dominant personalities of certain commun(iti)es couldn't stand all the attention given to geographers, astronomers, and other scientists of the time. Rather than putting in the time to learn science, they discovered they could just rehash some b.s. like that book. Thus they could appear like they knew something scientists were too unperceptive to catch. In other words, the motivation would be social capital.
It has a 19th century flavour to it.! Though Druids were a passion with the 18th century fashionable thinkers . See '100 Years of Archaeology' by Glyn Daniel
@@TheHverven "Of the time", also our time. You're right, narcissistic types like attention to be on them and to have vulnerable people in the palm of their hand. It's really "icky" (pardon the pun) to watch when they do it through some "superior knowledge" or "skill" and lead gullible types right up the garden path on crop circles, sound baths and woo-woo of all sorts. Most often the narcs will be siphoning their victims' money throughout, running workshops & talks, taking them on group tours, weekends away, etc etc. The narcs are charming as pie and their unknowing victims won't have had so much personal attention from anyone in years. Prime targets: middle-aged women with any amount of money, and young, attractive women, however David Icke with his well-known sports background did well to lure a lot of men into his ecosystem as well. (Ps I haven't studied the Icke phenomenon so do not know if he has narc characteristics.)
Something to consider!!!! But before I offer my opinion I would summarise what Alfred Watkins wrote. He described his theory in the introduction and first chapter and then asked readers to stop reading and told people to go out in the field (literally) and do their own research. How many people write that at the beginning of a book? Further on he describes that he could not see any practical use for for the lines but like the other non famous people, who Paul describes, he thought that his observations should be circulated. Bear in mind that Alfred Watkins was famous in other fields where his inventions did change the world in which he lived. He invented the first photo exposure meter. I sought out wilder areas of the country where many old features still existed and found mark stones on ley lines which were not on any map. I then gave up looking because, like Alfred Watkins, I could see no purpose in their existence and just like the examples of the ancients who carted huge stones to build huge stone circles and the people who constructed such as Maiden Castle, I could see no sensible reason for ancient man's efforts. Then I find the evidence that is ignored today by today's eminent archaeologists who refuse to consider, let alone try to explain, the technologies used to make huge structures and obviously machined artefacts made before the Egyptian civilisation. Now today I see the struggle of modern man to try and explain the contradictory problem of Einstein's now provable theories which do not fit in with the evidence that the force of gravity demonstrates. So I keep an open mind and keep looking. One thing I have learned in my 82 years of life is that the overall intelligence of those who surround me has deteriorated - except that there are some wonderful people out there who are still thinking and are very curious. They unfortunately seem to be very few. Was it always like that? I don't know. What I do see as important is that my fellow men seem so stupid as not to realise that our parliament has put aside our still existing real law to deprive those who are too stupid to see what has been done to deny our freedom to speak freely. I can and do use the real law but very few even know that it exists. Think I'm talking bollocks? How many of you know of the Minsk agreement? Wake up and stop your taxes being used to kill people in Ukraine and Gaza.
My theory why things like Ley Lines become popular from the 50s onwards but not so much before is that the population is no longer ingrained with agriculture or a rural life in general. 1-3% of people deal with agriculture. Less than 20% live in an area that is truly rural. People whose entire context is the city like to mysticise the countryside.
Brilliant video and I am very open minded to this subject. But I can tell you that two bent metal coat hangers are great at finding hidden drain runs or hidden manholes covers especially when I come to need to dig one up at work! Yes they do work!!!
I learned dowsing at university in the 1970s. A group of fifty of us were blind folded, given dowsing rods and told to walk across a sports pitch. As the rods crossed a second student following them placed a marker flag in the ground. At the end of an afternoon we had a herringbone pattern of markers on the ground. This described where terracotta drains had been laid to drain the sports pitch. A surveyor friend worked in a council where they had a commercially produced kit with samples of the material being searched for. Apparently copper pipes and steel pipes could be differentiated using dowsing.
@@zen4men They did so accidently when a fraudster flogged them a bunch of supposed mine detecting kit that used dowsing. They withdrew them soon afterwards when they realised they were dangerous and they had been duped.
My Quarry manager Stepdad successfully used dowsing rods to find leaks in a slurry pipeline that ran several miles from a clay-pit to a cement works. I poo-pooed it but then when facing the prospect of hand-digging a 100 yard trench for a septic tank soakaway because an unmarked 2" water-main was somewhere along it, I cut a forked hazel-rod from a bush & tried it. Made my mark, dug down straight & found it, so could then use the digger for the rest of the trench.
Hi Paul - like you, I had little time for ley lines until I read The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb. That’s not to say that he promotes ley lines but he certainly does claim that the Celts were capable of developing a geometric relationship with their world that science and archaeology haven’t traditionally considered. I’m summarising horribly but it’s not impossible that earlier cultures did create a geometric relationship with their world landscape that we can only see shadows of. Try it, you’ll thank me
Dousing is "compelling" in the exact same way that Ouija boards are "compelling": as a means of understanding the ideomotor phenomenon that all humans can fool themselves into believing actually means something.
I think "compelling" refers to the proven record of dowsers' abilities to correctly identify underground features, rather than any explanation to how and why it would be working. Your negative yet logically incoherent attitude is a compelling example of how debunking itself often needs debunking. But if you want to hear me out about how dowsing could be explained, you may be onto something with the ideomotor phenomenon and the way the human brain is made up of two halves, one being logical and linguistic, while the other is emotional and dumb, i.e. without language. The two halves work together, but we are taught to let the left side ("intelligent") half be in charge. When the "connecting cables" (corpus callosum) is severed they will operate more independently, and the right side brainhalf will reclaim some control of your left side, and your left hand will do things seemingly beyond your control or understanding. Perhaps dowsing is a method to allow your rightside brain, or your subconscious, or the dark half, whichever you choose to call it, to express itself by hand gestures or motions, revealing knowledge, or instinctual subliminal observations without being repressed by the super-ego's strict logical reluctance to take advise from the irrational, but perhaps more insightful rightside brain.
@binkwillans5138 It was felled 28 September 2023 in an act of vandalism by two men aged 38 and 31. They were charged with criminal damage both to the tree and nearby Hadrian's Wall. 😪
Another excellent video Paul. Science can't prove that there are no such things as Ley Lines so we surely have to accept that there 'might' be such things if there is sufficient historical commentary about them being something. I like science, but I also acknowledge that we don't understand everything around us. And also, even though there were many many lines weaving though your video, you didn't trip up on any. You nailed the "Jewish Ancient Apocalyptic Religious Text" line! ;) Nice one, cheers, Warren :)
Fascinating, as always. It made me think of how town planners etc lay out paths, often at right angles around lawns, but humans seem internally programmed to take the shortest route (and why not?), thus cutting across grassy areas, and even pushing through hedges, and ignoring the ‘official’ path. Presumably the ancients did the same when they could, so there probably are many routes from a to b, in as straight a line as possible, merely for convenience, not some magical property. That said, here in Cumbria there is an incredible number of prehistoric monuments still extant, and many many more known of through the centuries, though now disassembled and their original placing lost. One wonders if prehistoric mathematicians worked out more than the alignments with moon and sun and solstices, and had anything to do with where those monuments should be erected. But that would merely mean that yet again, humans would probably take the shortest or easiest route between them, as wildlife also do from a to b.
Considering the definition of the word 'line,' it can be both curved and straight. I’ve worked diligently on this (for about 10 to 20 seconds) and can now confirm your theory of 'The Great Greggs Ley Line.' You can draw an curvered line connecting every Greggs location, both now and in the future. You have made me a believer and I plan to drive this line as I love Sausage Rolls
A thoughtful treatment. From a geologist's POV, because we can measure such minute amounts of energy, but we can't validate the "energy" of leys or dowsing, it has no credibility.
@@binkwillans5138 Microwatts, jouls, calories, etc. are all measurement units of energy. But we can also measure energy related to atomic and particle physics. So if a person is detecting "energy", we should be able to measure that. But there is no energy detected from dowsing or earth energies that correspond to leys.
Long time viewer, first time leaving comment. Another great video. Great presentation, easy style, great editing & better each time. All ways keep a set of divining rods in my back pack, been all over the the world with my rods. Found some amazing things. They have a ban on it at Glastonbury Abbey which made I laugh. Next time you find a stone circle have a go with an open mind. Keep up the good work.
There is a scientific thing called The ideomotor response, whereby you subconsciously move something, whether it's the cup on a Ouija board, or the rods while dowsing, its because your senses have seen, felt, or smelt something that means the rods need to move at a certain spot. There is, or rather was, the million dollar challenge. The late James Randi challenged anyone to prove that dowsing (as we seem to be talking more about it than leylines per se) was an actual skill. Anyone who could pass a test, of their own devising, to prove that dowsing was real would get a million dollars. In all the time the offer was ongoing not a single person came close to claiming the prize.
Do you remember the thrills and chills when you were a kid trying to contact the dead with a Ouija board? I think Ley lines, ufos, etc. are just the adult version. Pleasant emotions painted with science colored paint.
Of all the fringe stuff UFOs, aka UAPs which are assumed to be aliens, are actually legit. I mean there is a possibility of aliens out there, but ouija boards, astral projection, etc are not legit, or yet to be proven. I want to believe. We have a sense of the beyond but it's just an illusion, and a need find the secret to life/universe etc.
Thank you, I did enjoy it... I've found quite a few buried water/drainage pipes with my rods. Sacred buildings/temples/churches/mosques/synagogues etc were built on top of previous ones to erase the past... IMHO.
I enjoyed this, I don't really believe in any of it, but I can see it's a source of comfort and could be part of a dream of living in harmony with nature, when so much of modern life is designed to remove us from it.
My 3rd .Obviously horizon structures are useful for navigation and Roman Roads come to mind but an exact line overlay . Let the spirit of truth be with you. G 🙏✌️☝️👍✅🦊
Месяц назад+5
Chcihen Itza guides in Mexico do a thing where they take you to stand in the middle of the old arena between two old walls, and clap their hands. Then move, a few feet and set the tempo, so there is no echo. They play it as magic and most of the people on the tour were (American) amazed. "How does this happen?" - "destructive interference" says me. Really basic physics, we should all know, where you are 180 degrees out of phase and the two waves cancel each other out, is the answer. Nobody wants to listen to an autistic smartarse like me, though, and prefer instead to just believe in an undefined sense of magic. I get that, and this was in the late 1990s, but this whole denial of facts is starting to take us all backwards.
The concept of destructive interference is a definitive answer to the mystery and one that's not especially easy to understand without the right background on how it works. So if they accepted what you were saying, they can no longer wonder about the cause, nor can they easily understand the answer. People are naturally curious and want to understand the world, but we have seen so much of the real picture now, that understanding all of it has become harder than any one person is capable of. So they seek mystery that can't be quantified, because then they can't be reduced back to the same position.
I am all in for science, but there’s just something about beautiful landscapes dotted with prehistoric enigmas that absolutely insists my imagination run wild. Without an attitude of embracing scientific skepticism, it’s inevitable that my imagination begins to feel like intuition. By the time I feel like I’ve intuited something, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a sense of knowing. And sometimes that’s actually an ok start on the journey of discovery. But it’s never the destination. No matter how tempting it may be to think so. The destination always entails some revision to that initially inspired imagination. Often it’s a complete rewrite. Our minds are quite an unwieldy thing to manage at times. 😂 Really beautiful content. Bravo 👏
"Why was this hill chosen to build a fort on?" Because you can see for miles around, which means whoever built it could see attackers coming far off. It's not rocket science, dude. I once drew a line from Edinburgh Castle, through the summit of Arthur's Seat, and continued it eastwards. It passed through Torness Point, where today there is a nuclear power station. A ley line believer stated, "Perhaps our ancestors knew that one day it would be a site of power." Ley lines however essentially are a flat Earth belief. They may work on a flat map, but that map does not allow for curvature of the Earth. Consider that if you look up flight paths online, most are depicted as curved against a flat map. So it is that even if over just a short distance on a map, the actual Earth is curving in all directions, therefore any alleged ley line is going to be inaccurate.
A pleasant surprise to see Marc on your vid as his channel covers so many of the places of my youth when I lived in England. When I attended an agricultural college in Surrey we were taught how to use dowsing to find drainage pipes in a field and it seemed to work and it was explained that perhaps the human spinal cord could possibly detect the interruption of magnetic fields thus causing involuntary muscle movement that was indicated by the rods. Also recall an episode of Nationwide on BBC that featured a guy that had made a device that could make lay lines on the land that he could later pick up with dowsing rods. Nowadays I use a metal detector to find stuff but maybe I shall make a couple of dowsing rods again 😉
It's so sad to me that in the modern world, with all the hard-won knowledge of science freely available to everyone, people still fall for hocus pocus like leylines, dowsing, homeopathy, astrology, ghosts, etc, etc
If these dowsing rods tells you where the lay lines and earth energy currents are. They also use them to detect where there’s water. How would you know the differences if you’re searching for water to dig a well? Very interesting video 👍👍
If you did want someone to go, “no, it’s moronic,” on camera, I would’ve been happy to do it. You made a well-reasoned reply to a deeply unreasoned theory, mine would’ve been less reasoned and more derisory. There is (was) a well respected archaeological journal that published a paper that mixed dowsing in with scientific techniques. The editor should’ve resigned in disgrace. Important places are linked by geography and political economy which is way more interesting but it may be because archaeologists have been incapable of communicating this that rubbish is replacing it in the popular imagination.
I don't know about ley lines. However I used dowsing for years working in architecture and topographical surveys. It's a good way to find power lines, water, pipes, voids under ground especially when the ground was over grown. We used a complicated bit of kit. Bent coat hangers, it worked every time. I also knew a man who did dowsing for big companies to place wells, he travelled all over the world doing this.
I knew an old farmer in the catskill Mountains NY who doused for water, but he also doused for earth energy fields, The BIG difference is that Mr Hull said that energy fields are dangerous to the human body. They cause cancer. You don't want to build a house or place your bed on top of one - because long term exposure is bad ( he said a bed should be placed on a north-south axis so that the earth's magnetic fields pass through the body properly). I was a skeptical college student and thought he was moving the rods, but he let me try and the rod definitely moved - pulled down. Mr Hull used willow rods, but he said wire coat hangers also work. Mr Hull never said anything about the earth's high energy spots connecting - creating Ley lines. When he doused for water, he could also tell the other farmer how far down the well would have to be drilled
Isn't it fascinating how a decide that is entirely and directly controlled by a human always does exactly what the human want's it to do... Also: what about all the monuments, water features and whatnot that *don't* line up nicely?
Well. We didn't know much of anything about what ancient structures of any sort were under our feet until the invention of Lidar, did we? We didn't know Jupiter had as many moons as it does until the invention of a stronger telescope, either. Therefore, it sure seems to me that just because science hasn't figured out a means to find something, it doesn't mean that something isn't there.
To be of interest to science, something has to be testable and have a mechanism or sound theoretical basis. It also needs someone with money willing to fund the research. Or someone like Galileo. Maybe one will come along soon.
Excellent punchline, Sir, and a top video that tread carefully but made some very good points about the way ideas form and science is built. Nice work!
Once spent a whole week investigating lines we found on an OS map seized from some very naughty people, even going to the local archaeological dept of the university. Their immediate conclusion was Ley Lines, ours was “ thank goodness for that, we have saved ourselves a lot of fingertip searching” .When we returned the maps after the investigation the naughty people asked how far we’d gone investigating map, i told them such and such a street Dept of Archaeology. We all laughed, tho we had the last laugh, they all went to jail!
Actually I never knew about ley lines but now I am noticing that my bed, my computer, my fridge, and my toilet are all in a straight line. And that's 99% of my day accounted for, all in a straight line, that can't be coincidental. They have to all be connected through a weird unaccounted for energy. I'll call this the efficient reclusive hermit force.
thanks for another great video. Could I ask please, when you were holding the dowsing rods what is your opinion as to the cause of the movement you experienced?
Hi Paul, thank you for this video. As you know Alfred Watkins " trackways " were lines of sight between local sites ie. churches, barrows, etc, that he spotted on his travels. The modern ley lines and energy lines are not really related to his work but do tie into the new age mindset. There may or may not be something to this ( you buys yer book, yer makes your own mind up 😁 ) Once again thank you for this video, I hope it makes people do a little research before just toeing the line ( ouch sorry v. bad pun 🤡🤡🤡🤡 )
@@philhawley1219 well that is possible, there is born every minute after all 😁, as I say do some research and make up your own mind ( no wrong answers just badly worded questions )..........
Hugely enjoyable! As someone who has personally hunted Higgs Bosons at CERN back in the day I find it great and really important that people like yourself, who have a substantial number of listeners, point these things out! Thanks!
@@binkwillans5138 OK, right you are - I should have been a bit more precise: Given my history, I was really happy to see Paul point out the importance of engaging with systematic science as compared to theories that have been invented without a shred of evidence.
@@MattMesserPics Look, Matt, I really appreciate your reply, but I need to push my key issue here: there is NO such thing as a theory without evidence. Theories are defined only after testing and research to ensure the FACTS are correct and never contradicted. I agree with you tho' that this guy's rational approach to archaeology is commendable.
But these words have both scientific and non-scientific meanings. A piece of music can have energy and an army can exert force. In the same way, people believing in woo-woo will not be using these words the same way a physicist does, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that in itself.
One place allegedly built on Ley Lines is Milton Keynes. According to the (unconfirmed) story, some of the town planners who designed it were Ley Line believers and laid the town out along them. Some of Milton Keynes' main streets are named after ancient monuments, e.g Silbury Boulevard, Avebury Boulevard, so it's vaguely plausible.
Just like in Australia how all the bits nominated as National Parks were the rocky, uneven, raised bits that no-one wanted as they were no good for crops or grazing. Few areas of valuable, broad, open savannah country or valley floors are preserved in their natural state.
Great video, Paul. Always good to see Marq as well. I’m definitely a key line sceptic but I wonder if there is something in Marq’s energy currents? I suppose it could be running water? What makes those dowsing rods turn like that?
I have noticed that my mind does a similar thing. When I have started a new job, for the first few weeks I am fixated on invoice numbers etc looking for significance or patterns, once I have properly learned the job interest in those things fades and I just go with the rhythm of the work. :)
Top class summing up at the beginning about the history of this phenomenon 😀. Many call it 'snake oil' and pseudo science (I'm being polite) but many do believe. I fall between the two somewhere as there is definitely something that draws us to these monuments. I'm no expert why this should be but I think its more because they are "interesting place to visit", rather then they are on ley lines.. I stick with it as I'm always worried that there may be something of value, which by dismissing it out-of-hand, is lost to us all? 🧐
In the words of the late great Jeremy Hardy, Ley Lines connect points of equal gullibility.
Brilliant
Jeremy Hardy died!? Shit!!! I had no idea. He wasn't even 60
Well stated.
I'd heard that ley lines converged on the point of gullibility? BTW I met Jeremy Hardy once when I delivered a package to his flat back in the day despatch riding in London.
@@robertmaitland09 The only Woo woo stuff I believe in is Despatch rider instinct and the inability to get absolutely lost. 🤣
As a walker/rambler over many years, I noticed that in parts of Sussex, one would find features that lead to a belief there was something of interest happening. Whilst studying the local OS maps I noticed that heading from the Long man of Wilmington heading towards Worth Saxon church at Crawley there were repeating features. Firstly farms called Coldharbour each about a day's walk apart. the next feature was ponds with islands in the middle of them. Also, many of the churches along the route were churches with spires and not towers; allowing that back in Saxon times most of Sussex was a forest large one can assume that the spire would act as a guide. Personally, I don’t think many of these features we see have anything to do with ley/energy lines but the result of many centuries of people moving about the countryside.
Very interesting, thank you.
Greg's helped you to extract some urine from this subject
We have to consider how people transversed the countryside back in the day without any aid other than the sun.
..
Even Stonehenge is aligned with the rising and lowering of the sun..in certain positions..
..
Most churches were built on a N-S pole orientation and yes, spire or towers were erected to make it easier to locate them.
..
Again no aid other than the sun.
Or a tall structure.
.
Most of these ancient sites/buildings most likely align on a N-S pole tragectory, influenced by the rising and setting of the sun.
I thought spires were Norman, and block towers Anglo-Saxon. Is that too broad a generalisation ?
@@sianwarwick633 it's also possible that some of the towers once had a wooden spire on them, poorer churches.
The problem with drawing straight lines on maps is that the earth is spherical. Map makers use various techniques such as Mercator's projection (1512 -1594) to replace the curved surface with a flat one around a tube. This means, in essence, that maps are distorted and inaccurate over distance. If Ley lines were magnetic force-fields then they ought to curve outwards from the poles of the earth, rather like iron filings around a bar magnet. As far as I am aware, claimed Ley lines don't look like that.
At the scale of the Gregg's map the line could be out on each point by several miles even on a flat surface ...
Exactly right. The difference between a Great Circle route and a Rhumb Line.
However, the difference between an ocean crossing and pointing to the church in the next village two miles away is rather different.
They need to let the crow decide as he goes as one flies.
A straight line to start that overrides how man's limitations fail to accurately depict anything truely.
Well, the Earth was flat in ancient times, so that's why their ley lines were straight on a flat map of the Earth.
Bonus points if it's a Piri Reis map...
In defence of Alfred Watkins, didn't he conclude that the old straight tracks he identified were simply a way of navigating a landscape that was more heavily forested in earlier times, trade routes and the like? The mystical baggage came much later and from others.
and quite boggy, too. Wasn't half of England marshland only a thousand years ago? Long enough for the significance of safe, if lesser used, passages to fade from memory. It would be neat to compare maps of those times and the ley lines maps.
@@marqsee7948 I think it was 6 thousand years ago, when Wales had a much wider westerly shore. At least there is evidence for that theory
@@sianwarwick633 oh, the draining of the wetlands in 1600-1700s. That's what I was looking for. Much more recent than I had thought.
The early 20th century saw a lot of belief in mysticism and supernature. It was very popular and fashionable
Actually, with all the forests, marshes, hills and at that time much less passable terrain in general, the fastest route between two places was rarely a straight line. Rather, it would be a meandering route through the most passable corridors between places. That's why, up to the Romans (who were the first to do some landscaping and even they would go around significant obstacles), roads would not be straight at all.
I think it's rather simple. People want to find meaning, hidden meaning is even better. Historical isn't enough, and personal meaning isn't respected enough, so they want magical meaning.
If we respected more what people see in old monuments and landscapes, what it looks like to them, what it evokes to them, then I'm certain that we'd have suddenly a lot less magical beliefs. Something is sacred or special because of people, and we tend to forget that.
I think it's still important to not that charlatanism isn't just about believe in ley lines, it's also about exploiting naive people. I don't think it's fair to just present this belief as something perfectly genuine. There are people who sell their beliefs. It's not about mocking the naive people, it's about condemning the people who exploit them.
Yeah its like Ive known people who do water dousing along ley lines, friendly normal curious people who tried a thing they thought sounded interesting and they had fun with it.
Then there are people who sell water dousing courses or offer paid expertise on ley lines to local developments however, they arent the same
If people can earnestly believe in a Buraq, then why not ley lines? It's just magical thinking, and most people indulge in it one way or the other.
Go and kiss the lucky.rock up the hill and speak to it. Been here longer than you. (In coding its called Rubber Ducking)
@@pedromorgan99 The lucky.rock must be earthfast.
This is a remarkably fair, reasonable , & proportionate take on this topic, considering it is a Comment / Reply on RUclips...?!
Growing up on a farm, i accepted dowsing to find water pipes/ springs as fact. Because we used it to do our work and it saved me countless hours of pointless digging as we found the original pipes, springs or buried leats first time. It was only when I got to university that I realised others didn’t use it or questioned it.
Animals too are supposed to know where to dig for water. It would be possible for a serious and unbiased study to prove or disprove that dowsing works. I am open to believing what you say but require solid proof. Were there cases where water was not found?
@@philipsmeetonyes, but they get forgotten. That’s how magical beliefs pers.
My late husband used dowsing to find electricity cables
Yes, dowzing is something that seems to work and can't be explained.
The well on my property was dowzed and is a very good well!
Some people seem to be able to do it, others can't!
I certainly cant!
@@philipsmeeton In south Devon the is a company that drills bore holes for water , that is located by dowsing , before drilling they will tell you the depth of the water level and the flow rate and extraction rate.😊
Great episode.
I was aware that Greggs has a spiritual significance for many, but was unaware that this was taken into account when the company chose their locations.
That explains why Newton Abbot has a Greggs.
Pie lines.
its obviously a lovecraftian cult.... f'thagn
@@Dave5843-d9m All it had when i lived there was charity shops
@@paulsengupta971 Genius 😂👏
When I did my PhD I had to give regular progress presentations to departmental staff on my progress. I was modelling molecular interactions, and presented a paper on how the two results I had so far produced fell on a straight line; then at a subsequent seminar at _the Fenton_ I explained why the third measurement was an outlier.
Haha
@@frogandspanner hahahahah
You should have used a log-log plot at the Fenton :D
Yes, but that third measurement still fell on the graph paper. You really needed a fourth data point to show that even a flat 2 axis plot can be a bad fit. (-:
😂😂
Many years ago¹, when the internet was all text, I read a paper about ley lines². It was a mathematician who admitted that he wanted it to be true, so wrote the paper to show how unlikely these straight lines between old structures would be. His conclusion, as you found with Greggs and Matt with (IIRC) old Woolworth's shops, is that straight lines pop up all the time amongst a random collection of points.
Great video - keep up the good work!
¹ I nearly started "once upon a time" but that might have suggested that I made this up.
² I have tried to find it again but without success - too many newer ley lines posts, I suppose. Or it might well have disappeared at some time in the last 20-odd years.
There's yhe whole thing about ideas that go in and out of fashion. But, the other thing is, eerie-ness is kind of great when you're wandering around someplace, especially a place that's new to you.
Ah the days when the internet was all text! Thanks for the memory. Then those flashing headlines and crawling ants came along.
its line of sight i live on a farm in east sussex below a bronze age causeway camp i have very dense woods on the farm in summer you cant see above ferns and canopy so you use a high point on the downs you pick on your route and follow it straight and low and behold you spot churches abbys hillforts all line up its pure accident by virtue of terrain
Mesolithic and neolithic peoples began to guestimate the size of the earth,from mathematical truth's of the proportion's and distance's of the moon relative to the earth and sun(astro archeology)they realized the moon's shadow travelled at a certain speed and during an eclipse exactly covered the sun being exactly 1/400th the distance to the sun,and the moon being exactly 1/400th the distance to the sun,giving away the exact circumference of the earth proportionally.to prove this they used ropes at a given(predicted eclipse)to measure the circumference of the earth in exact straight line's using shadow sticks ,,,where upon they built the first megalithic structure's all over the planet as marker's.bit by bit with rope's,shadow stick's and astronomical observances structure's and triangulations between them(wobbling planet(26k year's)they extended their knowledge to prove the true size of the earth from every continent and country.and people wonder why there are straight line's,this amaze's me
Matt Parker did that. If you search for his name, "Woolworth" and "ley lines", you'll find the map and an explanation in a 2010 post on the "bad science blog".
When I was studying landscape archaeology, we were encouraged to consider why all the famous archaeological sites were clustered in certain areas. We came up with all sorts of possible reasons about the topography, climate, water sources etc. It was only when a map of such features was overlayed with the principal residences of the most eminent antiquarians that it became clear...
Co-incidentally, out of curiosity I'm reading Watkins' 'Old Straight Track' - the cosmic energy stuff wasn't 'til the 60s. Yesterday our neighbour said he'd just found a water leak (underground) - he works for Severn Trent, often as a dowser. We tried it as kids and I could do it, much to my brothers' annoyance, having found various drains & water pipes. Were beacons lit on the hills to guide travellers? smoke by day, was the light reflected in 'dew' ponds along the way. Churches built on earlier sacred ground, yew trees, yet tumuli often found on the edge of a parish boundary. I'm enjoying finding out about such places, visiting the Carnac alignment was much more impressive than Stone henge - I'm old enough to know I won't know why somethings just don't add up, keep an open mind...
As a digger driver, my divining rods are as important in my tool box as my grease gun. Mine are very similar to the rods that you were using, accept mine are just two bent bits of fence wire. For over forty years now, I will walk a grid pattern with my rods across the area were I have been asked to dig. What I think I find is "ground disturbance", because it doesn't matter what I find, weather it be an old wall foundation, a water pipe, a drain or a phone/electric cable. I always find whatever it was that I detected, although I never know what I have detected until I dig it up, with one exception, I sometimes can guess walls if I find corners. Don't for one second think that I am dissing your guest, far from it, I once watched a guy use a hazel twig to find a suitable site for a well, and then he turned round and told me how deep to dig, he was accurate to about a foot. Incidentally I tried to divine the underground water source and couldn't find it. Divining fascinates me, as I can do it and I can trust it, but I have no idea how it works.
I think it is best to be tuned-in naturally.
I had tried metal rods once,
and got a reaction.
An oak tree with 7 trunks,
within feet of a crop circle in Cornwall,
and standing at the outside edge of the leaves,
I could rock back and forth half an inch,
the rods would instantly cross,
and I would feel a milld electric shock
seek to ground through my leg.
Then sometime later,
I was in a field in Cornwall.
I bent down to pick up
an unusually-shaped white field crystal.
It fitted perfectly in my hand,
and as I lifted it,
it headed "by itself" straight up to the Sun,
strongly spiralling as it did so,
before dropping to Earth to ground.
By "strongly",
my hand was practically spinning off!
Then it returned to waist height,
gently oscilating left to right.
Irealised instantly
that I had been handed a merans to dowse.
/
Within a couple of weeks,
I realised I did not have to hold the stone.
Having stated what I was looking for,
and opened up the energy,
by pointing to the Sun,
with a quick spiralling to connect,
the hand drops to waist height,
and a right or left oscillation /spin
tells me which way to go.
It is a very fast technique for dowsing,
as it takes you directly to your target.
None of this walking up and down
until a rod crosses
or a pendulum swings.
On arrival,
I feel a very strong downward spiral -
hard to miss!
/
Good for u boyo. whatever works, works. I know someone who uses just a crystal t find location n depth of good water.. they get lots of work from it.
It was a digger driver who taught me 60 years ago, when I saw him trying to find a pipe on a building site opposite my home. He dug down to it, and he found it alright:
Being on a hill, it erupted a fountain of sewage. Not all diggers had a cab in those days, so he got showered in sh!t.
Thus I have found a water-pipe a yard underground in the middle of a field, digging a hole just 18 inches wide to connect to it. But you are right - dowsing finds ground disturbance, so it is useless at my former market gardens, where there are current and disused heating, irrigation and drain pipes a-plenty.
All double-blind scientific research indicates "dowsing" works at a rate no better than chance. Gonna go with the science rather than one random story.
You are deluded .... downing has proven to be near useless ..
As another digger operator, I also use divining rods to find water pipes with a very good success rate, I use copper rods with two pieces of water pipe over the handle ends to restrict cheating and it takes out the human ability to hold metal wrongly, I can't explain how it works ,it just does for me, my brother tried it and had no luck go figure!
I used to work for Rolls-Royce (aero-engines!) before I retired and back in the late 1980s I was involved in a big rig test at the Hucknall airfield site that was to use a very big electric motor that had been installed during WW2 and not used since. There were no records of where the power lines ran underground - understandably, as there were other priorities at the time. I attended regular progress meetings and was astonished when the sub-contractors said they were using a diviner to find the underground cables so they weren't damaged during the construction of the rig. These are two very serious engineering companies, RR and the sub-contractors, and not noted for woo or magic. They found the cables, so I assume the diviner did his job! We experimented ourselves in our lab using rods like the ones Paul used with intermittent success. I remain a sceptic, so far.
Loved the Greggs example! It shows you have to be careful trying to draw conclusions without a LOT of research.
Correlation is not causation. Very important.
yes. Primarily practical. then as now
Dowsing is used by mining & oil companies, & especially water well drilling companies. Drilling dry hole is very expensive & they have simply found it works & saves them money & improves results.
I was very amused once when we needed to reroute a water pipe. The guy from Yorkshire Water came out in his van, casually took a pair of dowsing rods out of his pocket, & told us to dig here, here, & here! He was spot on.
I've successfully found a buried water pipe too to a 6 inch accuracy too.
@@alanjewell9550 Considering oil is located several km below the ground, doesn't that involve impracticaly long divining rods?
Bizarrely as you held up the map in the car, I said to myself...Greggs shops...
Im now looking at setting myself up as a psychic, a new life and business awaits me!
Rumbled.
I thought it was going to be Tesco
@@grannyweatherwax9666Morrisons.
"Have I Got News For You" once had a peice where they showed some very interesting geometric lay lines in Northern England. The punchline was that they were all Morrisons supermarkets in a certain area.
What are the lottery numbers? 😊
I thought McDonald's, as modern sites of worship for some. A strong source of negative energy in my view!
As an experiment, you could take a compass back to where the rods moved, and see if the compass needle would move when you walked to the spot that the rods moved.
Good shout. I'd love to understand what was going on there.
Or attach an inclinometer to the person's hands, to see if they were tilting the rods so they would fall to one side. This could be completely unconscious and the person may believe he was detecting some form of mythical "energy", you could tilt your hand ever so slightly that you wouldn't be aware of it, but the rods would turn nevertheless. Depending on how you hold them, the rods could be in an unstable equilibrium so the tiniest amount of tilt would make them turn 90 degrees to the side.
@@pwhitewickThere's research out there on what actually goes on as well as plenty of double blind tests which disprove water divining et al.
And on a side point Jamie Hyman of Mythbusters fame once disappointingly refused to test any of this nonsense on the grounds that the results might upset the people being tested.
@@valterhilden7219 That's exactly how to use the forked hazel rod. Deliberately set it up in an unstable equilibrium by slight inwards bending.
@@pwhitewick Yes... but as someone with a degree in Physics, I'm much more inclined to believe successful detection is a currently unknown property (or heightened sensitivity) of the dowser's personal bio-chemistry, than a purely physical effect such as magnetism.
“An experiment can be considered a success if you have to discard no more than fifty percent of the data points in order to achieve correlation with the desired results” or something like that.
Also “correlation does not imply causation”.
An experiment is only a 'success' if it the result is substantially greater than its original probability estimate. That's why science is not about confirmation bias.
Here in western Canada, dowsing is a commonly used method of locating underground water for drilling wells. I've seen it myself and heard quite a few stories verifying its use.
If you dig far enough there are a great many places where you'll find water. Some places it's right on the surface.
How many times has it not worked? And more pointedly, how much effort was put into getting a sufficient random (unbiased) sample of 'stories' that were not just anecdotal? Water dowsing never holds up under such conditions.
It works because water is literally EVERYWHERE in the ground. In places in Canada, precipitations are high enough that the ground water table is fairly close to the surface. But the GWT is not "localized" in specific points. It's literally underlaying the *entire* landscape.
There's yet to be anyone who can prove that dowsing works under scientific conditions. I know a few folk that said it did seem to work, even though they were aware it's not a proven method to find water, or gold etc.
@@buretto66
If dowsing didn't work people wouldn't use it!!
🤷🤷🤷
pattern recognition gone wrong
Yup as Marq says.
Growing up in the 1970s, there was a lot of the new-age, crystals and ley lines stuff going on and, being fascinated in ancient monuments since I was a little kid, I kinda got drawn into it all. And we had TV shows like Children of the Stones and all, so it was all part of the zeitgeist. Plus, my father, who was a surveyor by trade, and a very scientific man by nature, used to use dowsing rods to find underground water, and seemed to be fairly successful at doing so. Older and more sceptical nowadays, I find myself thinking as you do.
As a side note, I remember many years ago chatting to an old chap in a pub in the Avebury area. He told me he'd lived in the village all his life, having been born there about 20 years BC. "BC?", I enquired. "Before Crystals", he replied without batting an eyelid.
Fun Fact 2: The Old Straight Track is the second studio album by the British folk rock band Jack the Lad, released in 1974. Jack the Lad was formed by former members of Lindisfarne after that band's initial split, and they carried on a similar blend of folk and rock influences, with a more pronounced focus on traditional British folk styles.
The album's title references Alfred Watkins' 1925 book The Old Straight Track, which discusses ley lines-ancient, straight trackways said to connect various historical and spiritual sites across Britain. This theme aligns with the band's interest in British history and folklore, often reflected in their lyrics.
But do you believe the clear white light?
{:o:O:}
Also referenced in Jethro Tull's song "Cup of Wonder."
@ that’s brilliant. Jack the Lad was my first live gig. Top Rank in Cardiff. Also when Lindisfarne reformed they were playing darts in The Old Arcade before the Cardiff gig. Had a pint with them!
@@ansfridaeyowulfsdottir8095 It's going to guide us on!
Indeed a brill contribution to UK folk rock, they shared producers with Lindisfarne. Also study the cover art for the Albion Band ...Prospect before you ... its a cartoon style landscape with a surprised viewer spotting the lines in landscape. Ley lines are not lines of mystery energy.
I dont know if its connected, but the 1920's was the era when radio technologies started to appear for the man in the street- invisible signals travelling in straight lines from hill tops and tall structures. Maybe the inspiration for the interest in energy lines comes from this.
Apparently he just saw some lines - pathways - in the landscape. They connected some ancient sites with each other and some churches. Actually it isn’t more than this.
I suppose - But I think the idea of straight lines came a bit before that! Although straight lines in our landscape are often not very practical, having a guide as you hike over hedges and climb thru ditches at night would be some help in finding the way.
I read a book called;
' The Pattern of the Past' by Guy Underwood . In this book he says how he discovered by dowsing that many ancient sites were built over fields of energy or Ley Lines, and if you connected these sites they revealed a line of energy across the country. Not that the energy is in a straight line as claimed here, but at sites that connected in a straight line.
One of the sites he mentioned was Glastonbury Tor and once when I visited it, there was guide telling all the stories connected to the Tor including that it was built on a Ley Line. He then produced some dowsing rods and asked if any one would like to try them. Someone from the crowd came forward and held the rods as instructed and walking from the tower in a straight line, at a certain point the rods crossed much to the surprise of everyone present particularly the guy who was holding them.
@@johnbrereton5229 great story and many such stories can be told.
@@helenswan705
Yes most likely they can, because dowsing is a fact and it's been used for thousands of years to detect water sources. It's all related to the earth's magnetic fields which even dogs can detect, thats why they walk in circles before defecating, they are actually aligning themselves with this energy field.
One caveat regarding the line of St. Michael sites: a straight line on a 2-dimensional map becomes a curved line when projected onto a globe. Straight flights from one city to another appear as arcs and curves when plotted on a flat map. Therefore, what appears on that map to be a straight line, when taken into three dimensions, suddenly isn't. As Marq pointed out: we are pattern-seeking mammals; this is why we see shapes in clouds, faces in woodgrain, shapes in television static (for those old enough to remember that).
The St Michael sites are still aligned, albeit on a curve. What you're really saying is that ley lines should not naturally be straight. We already know that through electromagnetism.
@@binkwillans5138 Yes, but due to the projection method, that curve isn't constant. The distortion increases the further North you go.
@@WaterShowsProd Actually, I was intrigued by the Mont St Michel bit. My own hypothesis is that structures were built along geological lines and hilltops which were used for bonfire beacons before the digital age.
.
Lot of room for nonsense tho.
Thank you for your rationality and humane approach to what is to me obvious nonsense.
Way back as a young teenager in the 60's/70's I read a book about UFO incidents. A common experience was that cars would stop and the engine cut out. This was stated to have happened to different cars at various times. The phenomenon was part of Roy Neary's fictional experience in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind".
The suggestion in the book was that deposits of magnetic lodestone lay close to the surface of the road. This affected the steel components in the ignition system.
If true, it would affect metal divining rods, if made of a magnetic metal.
Having said all that, I believe the ancient peoples built Stonehenge and the pyramids using experience, mathematics, and the ability to focus on a problem or project without distraction. Just as Brunel and Telford built incredible structures in the 19th century.
Even with computers, I think it is staggering that French and British engineers built the Channel tunnel, starting at each end and meeting in the middle, under the sea, less than a foot adrift (if you pardon the phrase).
We underestimate our own abilities as a species far too often
David Icke explained it all to me. Its magnetic diamond dust in a cortex of subconsciousness thinking
@@pedromorgan99 All curated by lizards.
Monuments such as Stonehenge would have been built first prototyped using wooden stakes and then these replaced by heavier things. Stones last a long longer than wooden poles or tree trunks therefore replacing wooden henges with stone is a very natural and obvious process. The effort required to do this and to fit them all together, that's something else entirely.
This was a good, balanced look at the subject. Good work Paul!
I've read Alfred Watkins' The Old Straight Track and I didn't get the sense he was trying to assign any mystical or paranormal meaning to the fact that ancient points of interest sometimes had routes between them which were straight lines. The central thesis to me seemed to be simply that in an era when there wasn't much concern over land ownership, it made sense to take the most direct route between two points (barring, occasionally, significant obstacles in the landscape). That notion is uncontroversial for Roman roads, so it doesn't seem so contentious to me that civilisations a bit before that may have come to the same conclusion.
The more mystical side to it came, as you pointed out in the video, with people like John Michell in the 1960s. I actually thought Watkins came across as a pragmatist though. Perhaps he was occasionally a bit over zealous in looking for those patterns once he got that bug, but the core idea he espoused really didn't seem to be anything more far fetched than the idea that if you need to get from A to B, the shortest route is a straight line.
Agree. pragmatic.
his book was brilliant for making you realise the pre Roman people of this land had already laid out pathways to get from A to B and for example made notches in hills to aim for if you wanted to go to a specific place to get a specific thing. He thought the Romans when they came probably used roads already there. I liked his theory why a snail is called a "dodman" in some dialects because they carry "surveyors poles" on their heads and a dodman was someone who surveyed pathways. The Long Man of Wilmington could be one of the surveyors with his two poles
I remember when Tom Scott did a website showing the leylines connecting old Woolworths stores with as much or better accuracy
I was freaked out when someone told me that if you pick any three churches on a map they will always make a triangle. It was true, and a bit spooky for about 20 seconds.
That would be the Tom Scott that looks like, sounds like, and gets stage billing as, Matt Parker. (-:
Considering Woolworths would have all been in towns it's even less surprising.
@@JdeBP My Memory from 2010/2011 is apparently blurry ... Matt Parker wrote the Woolworths Leylines site for Ben Goldacre in 2010 ... and Tom Scott did a leylines postcode finder that did a similar thing in 2011....
@@ZER0-- The 3 churches will always make an isosceles triangle.
.
True or false?
Wayland Smithy is my favourite Simpsons character.
I had no idea he'd been around that long, that's nearly as old as Mr. Burns!
I came here looking for this comment 😅
I have no clue how you think up, write and then film these interesting videos esp with these subject areas but I very glade you make and share them
Big upsurge in interest in the 60's... & then another in the 90's? Of course there's no relationship to psychtropic substances. Unless you count a Greggs Chicken & Mushroom Bake.
Humans are quite good at finding patterns (but seemingly not good at applying critical thinking when examining why they exist). And we seem to yearn for higher meaning. Put those two together and you explain a large portion of the woo and other BS out there.
For 51 years James Randi ran a paranormal Challenge. It started out as a $1,000 price to people who could show their paranormal ability. Over the years that price went up to One Million Dollars and nobody ever claimed the price. The challenge ended in 2015.
Why wouldn't even one of the millions of paranormal practitioners in the world step up and claim the price in 51 years? They all claim it's real but nobody were ready to earn 1 million Dollars although pretty much every one of them takes money from their victims.
There have been published countless books explaining different paranormal fields, and yet non of those authors ever claimed the price. This should be an easy task, as they claim to understand and prove the existence of their paranormal field. It should have been like picking up a million dollars of the ground for them, but nobody bothered to do it.
Why wouldn't any of them take the money? The Nobel committee have no problems finding several candidates every year within a narrow field of the sciences, but the vast number of paranormal fields can't produce even one in 51 years? It would have blown the Nobel price out of the water, but somehow nobody were interested?
Sorry, but I find it extremely hard to believe.
Question.
Do you think then, going on your comment,
that the _use_ of dousing rods is
"paranormal "
?
@@stuartd9741 I think it is as 'paranormal' as all the other effects since it isn't real. The other day I overheard someone say they have a chiropractor that uses muscle testing and can see auras. Might as well add he could float in the air. I used to believe in a lot of these things but I kept looking into it and it is all bogus.
Auras, crystals, dreamcatchers, tarot cards, you name it
@@stuartd9741try using English.
@@stuartd9741 It was included in the paranormal Challenge and there is no established normal explanation to it. Dousing rods was part of a few thousand of the failed attempts to win the challenge and non of them passed the threshold for pure chance.
So yes dousing rods, are paranormal as in beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding. Saying otherwise would be a lie.
7:30 shows the problem with dowsing rods quite clearly. It may feel like you're holding them out straight, but gravity is a thing, and levers are, too.
There you go just solved the dowsing mystery.
Dowsing rods are gravity powered....
@@stuartd9741 In some instances they may be wind powered. This needs more study.
Hedley Thorne has taken over RUclips today! Three videos!
I wasn’t aware there was another resurgence in ley lines, but I do get quite frequent comments about them on my videos. Typically people complaining that I didn’t consider them.
If I remember correctly, Watkins didn’t talk about energy lines - he was of the view that ancient sites were connected by straight routes. In his day, the critics debunked his arguments based on the huge discrepancies in the ages of the linked sites. A Medieval church and a Neolithic henge, for instance.
I struggle with Watkin’s routes and I struggle even more with the energy lines concept.
This video was shot before some antiquarian lured me into another time dimension!
Prolific isn't he!
Dark energy is as powerful as it is mysterious. Ley lines isn't even scratching the surface of that one. (ρ ∝ a0)
Who knew the Universe was (observationally) flat? ie. An absence of any detectable global curvature.
I can see power lines, particularly the 400kV ones.
You can hunt for them by carrying around magic rods known as fluorescent tube lights.
Back in my hippy days of the 60s I remember some of my friends got into this leylines thing. I also remember thinking if you made a map of sites that were NOT on leylines what would that give you? Are those sites to be regarded as errors or could you find patterns in them anyway?
I blame the Victorians, who became obsessed with pseudo-spirituality, pseudo science and pseudo intellectualism, eventually resulting in the made-up world we live in today.
Another thought crossed my mind seeing this: Dominant personalities of certain commun(iti)es couldn't stand all the attention given to geographers, astronomers, and other scientists of the time.
Rather than putting in the time to learn science, they discovered they could just rehash some b.s. like that book. Thus they could appear like they knew something scientists were too unperceptive to catch.
In other words, the motivation would be social capital.
It has a 19th century flavour to it.! Though Druids were a passion with the 18th century fashionable thinkers . See '100 Years of Archaeology' by Glyn Daniel
I love pseudo spirituality. Dan Aykroyd has written a fantastic book about it, because his family were practitioners in the 20s. Highly recommended.
@@TheHverven "Of the time", also our time. You're right, narcissistic types like attention to be on them and to have vulnerable people in the palm of their hand.
It's really "icky" (pardon the pun) to watch when they do it through some "superior knowledge" or "skill" and lead gullible types right up the garden path on crop circles, sound baths and woo-woo of all sorts. Most often the narcs will be siphoning their victims' money throughout, running workshops & talks, taking them on group tours, weekends away, etc etc.
The narcs are charming as pie and their unknowing victims won't have had so much personal attention from anyone in years.
Prime targets: middle-aged women with any amount of money, and young, attractive women, however David Icke with his well-known sports background did well to lure a lot of men into his ecosystem as well. (Ps I haven't studied the Icke phenomenon so do not know if he has narc characteristics.)
Something to consider!!!! But before I offer my opinion I would summarise what Alfred Watkins wrote. He described his theory in the introduction and first chapter and then asked readers to stop reading and told people to go out in the field (literally) and do their own research. How many people write that at the beginning of a book? Further on he describes that he could not see any practical use for for the lines but like the other non famous people, who Paul describes, he thought that his observations should be circulated. Bear in mind that Alfred Watkins was famous in other fields where his inventions did change the world in which he lived. He invented the first photo exposure meter. I sought out wilder areas of the country where many old features still existed and found mark stones on ley lines which were not on any map. I then gave up looking because, like Alfred Watkins, I could see no purpose in their existence and just like the examples of the ancients who carted huge stones to build huge stone circles and the people who constructed such as Maiden Castle, I could see no sensible reason for ancient man's efforts. Then I find the evidence that is ignored today by today's eminent archaeologists who refuse to consider, let alone try to explain, the technologies used to make huge structures and obviously machined artefacts made before the Egyptian civilisation.
Now today I see the struggle of modern man to try and explain the contradictory problem of Einstein's now provable theories which do not fit in with the evidence that the force of gravity demonstrates. So I keep an open mind and keep looking. One thing I have learned in my 82 years of life is that the overall intelligence of those who surround me has deteriorated - except that there are some wonderful people out there who are still thinking and are very curious. They unfortunately seem to be very few. Was it always like that? I don't know. What I do see as important is that my fellow men seem so stupid as not to realise that our parliament has put aside our still existing real law to deprive those who are too stupid to see what has been done to deny our freedom to speak freely. I can and do use the real law but very few even know that it exists. Think I'm talking bollocks? How many of you know of the Minsk agreement? Wake up and stop your taxes being used to kill people in Ukraine and Gaza.
My theory why things like Ley Lines become popular from the 50s onwards but not so much before is that the population is no longer ingrained with agriculture or a rural life in general. 1-3% of people deal with agriculture. Less than 20% live in an area that is truly rural. People whose entire context is the city like to mysticise the countryside.
'The most important thing in life is to have a built-in, shock proof, twenty four carat crap detector ' (modified from Henry Miller)😂
Brilliant video and I am very open minded to this subject. But I can tell you that two bent metal coat hangers are great at finding hidden drain runs or hidden manholes covers especially when I come to need to dig one up at work! Yes they do work!!!
yup. super practical!
@@helenswan705 It's definitely old school technology that still works today 👍
I learned dowsing at university in the 1970s. A group of fifty of us were blind folded, given dowsing rods and told to walk across a sports pitch.
As the rods crossed a second student following them placed a marker flag in the ground.
At the end of an afternoon we had a herringbone pattern of markers on the ground. This described where terracotta drains had been laid to drain the sports pitch.
A surveyor friend worked in a council where they had a commercially produced kit with samples of the material being searched for. Apparently copper pipes and steel pipes could be differentiated using dowsing.
The army uses them for mines
Is that safe?@@zen4men
@@zen4men They did so accidently when a fraudster flogged them a bunch of supposed mine detecting kit that used dowsing. They withdrew them soon afterwards when they realised they were dangerous and they had been duped.
@@zen4men Which army? The U.S. Army does not use dowsing devices for detecting mines.
My Quarry manager Stepdad successfully used dowsing rods to find leaks in a slurry pipeline that ran several miles from a clay-pit to a cement works. I poo-pooed it but then when facing the prospect of hand-digging a 100 yard trench for a septic tank soakaway because an unmarked 2" water-main was somewhere along it, I cut a forked hazel-rod from a bush & tried it. Made my mark, dug down straight & found it, so could then use the digger for the rest of the trench.
When I started watching this my guess was Lidl. I was close. I knew it would be something banal. Now where did I leave my tin foil hat?
Haha... Lidl was next door!
Hi Paul - like you, I had little time for ley lines until I read The Ancient Paths by Graham Robb. That’s not to say that he promotes ley lines but he certainly does claim that the Celts were capable of developing a geometric relationship with their world that science and archaeology haven’t traditionally considered. I’m summarising horribly but it’s not impossible that earlier cultures did create a geometric relationship with their world landscape that we can only see shadows of. Try it, you’ll thank me
Dousing is "compelling" in the exact same way that Ouija boards are "compelling": as a means of understanding the ideomotor phenomenon that all humans can fool themselves into believing actually means something.
I think "compelling" refers to the proven record of dowsers' abilities to correctly identify underground features, rather than any explanation to how and why it would be working. Your negative yet logically incoherent attitude is a compelling example of how debunking itself often needs debunking. But if you want to hear me out about how dowsing could be explained, you may be onto something with the ideomotor phenomenon and the way the human brain is made up of two halves, one being logical and linguistic, while the other is emotional and dumb, i.e. without language. The two halves work together, but we are taught to let the left side ("intelligent") half be in charge. When the "connecting cables" (corpus callosum) is severed they will operate more independently, and the right side brainhalf will reclaim some control of your left side, and your left hand will do things seemingly beyond your control or understanding. Perhaps dowsing is a method to allow your rightside brain, or your subconscious, or the dark half, whichever you choose to call it, to express itself by hand gestures or motions, revealing knowledge, or instinctual subliminal observations without being repressed by the super-ego's strict logical reluctance to take advise from the irrational, but perhaps more insightful rightside brain.
Excellent video Paul, thought provoking, and amusing at the end. I know which line of travel I would use.........yum yum!!!!
So sad to see the Sycamore Gap Tree before it was sawn down!
How come it was sawn down? Was it unsafe? Most countries this is illegal.
@binkwillans5138 It was felled 28 September 2023 in an act of vandalism by two men aged 38 and 31. They were charged with criminal damage both to the tree and nearby Hadrian's Wall. 😪
@@jimroberts3009 Thanks. Folks need taught to treasure what's left.
Another excellent video Paul. Science can't prove that there are no such things as Ley Lines so we surely have to accept that there 'might' be such things if there is sufficient historical commentary about them being something. I like science, but I also acknowledge that we don't understand everything around us.
And also, even though there were many many lines weaving though your video, you didn't trip up on any. You nailed the "Jewish Ancient Apocalyptic Religious Text" line! ;)
Nice one, cheers, Warren :)
Rubbish. Never been laid once in their vicinity.
??
@@pwhitewick It's a pretty rubbish joke - lay/laid, intentional misunderstanding for purposes of forcing a joke.
Fascinating, as always. It made me think of how town planners etc lay out paths, often at right angles around lawns, but humans seem internally programmed to take the shortest route (and why not?), thus cutting across grassy areas, and even pushing through hedges, and ignoring the ‘official’ path. Presumably the ancients did the same when they could, so there probably are many routes from a to b, in as straight a line as possible, merely for convenience, not some magical property. That said, here in Cumbria there is an incredible number of prehistoric monuments still extant, and many many more known of through the centuries, though now disassembled and their original placing lost. One wonders if prehistoric mathematicians worked out more than the alignments with moon and sun and solstices, and had anything to do with where those monuments should be erected. But that would merely mean that yet again, humans would probably take the shortest or easiest route between them, as wildlife also do from a to b.
I strongly believe in Ley Lines, crystals, astrology, and politicians only speak the truth. I'm definitely not a nutter.
Well I can certainly believe that politicians only speak the truth and in crystals, but astrology and ley lines? Pfft. Nutjob. :P
😅
Yes you are.
Okay... _one_ of those things is definitely not real!
Astrology is such a fluffball of nothing. No science in it whatsoever. Not to be confused with astronomy.
Considering the definition of the word 'line,' it can be both curved and straight.
I’ve worked diligently on this (for about 10 to 20 seconds) and can now confirm your theory of 'The Great Greggs Ley Line.' You can draw an curvered line connecting every Greggs location, both now and in the future.
You have made me a believer and I plan to drive this line as I love Sausage Rolls
Any two branches of Greggs lie on a great circle; any three branches can be connected by a plane. That Euclid fellow was on to something. (-:
A thoughtful treatment. From a geologist's POV, because we can measure such minute amounts of energy, but we can't validate the "energy" of leys or dowsing, it has no credibility.
Care to rephrase that? Sorry, but it makes no sense. What is this minute energy we can measure?
@@binkwillans5138 Microwatts, jouls, calories, etc. are all measurement units of energy. But we can also measure energy related to atomic and particle physics. So if a person is detecting "energy", we should be able to measure that. But there is no energy detected from dowsing or earth energies that correspond to leys.
@@SpookyGeology ok, thanks. My personal view is that dowsers are secretly expert geomorphologists. They understand the land.
Long time viewer, first time leaving comment. Another great video. Great presentation, easy style, great editing & better each time. All ways keep a set of divining rods in my back pack, been all over the the world with my rods. Found some amazing things. They have a ban on it at Glastonbury Abbey which made I laugh. Next time you find a stone circle have a go with an open mind. Keep up the good work.
There is a scientific thing called The ideomotor response, whereby you subconsciously move something, whether it's the cup on a Ouija board, or the rods while dowsing, its because your senses have seen, felt, or smelt something that means the rods need to move at a certain spot.
There is, or rather was, the million dollar challenge. The late James Randi challenged anyone to prove that dowsing (as we seem to be talking more about it than leylines per se) was an actual skill. Anyone who could pass a test, of their own devising, to prove that dowsing was real would get a million dollars. In all the time the offer was ongoing not a single person came close to claiming the prize.
Too much skepticism is almost as bad as not enough skepticism. Enjoyed the balance in this video
Do you remember the thrills and chills when you were a kid trying to contact the dead with a Ouija board? I think Ley lines, ufos, etc. are just the adult version. Pleasant emotions painted with science colored paint.
There's no science in it at all; just the opposite. It's all BS.
Of all the fringe stuff UFOs, aka UAPs which are assumed to be aliens, are actually legit. I mean there is a possibility of aliens out there, but ouija boards, astral projection, etc are not legit, or yet to be proven. I want to believe. We have a sense of the beyond but it's just an illusion, and a need find the secret to life/universe etc.
Not the same at all.
Agree with Helen.
Not the same.
At all.
..
There's a right and wrong way to use ouija board.
And no, I
haven't used one.
As a kid, it never occurred to me to try to make contact with the dead.
Thank you, I did enjoy it... I've found quite a few buried water/drainage pipes with my rods. Sacred buildings/temples/churches/mosques/synagogues etc were built on top of previous ones to erase the past... IMHO.
I enjoyed this, I don't really believe in any of it, but I can see it's a source of comfort and could be part of a dream of living in harmony with nature, when so much of modern life is designed to remove us from it.
My 3rd .Obviously horizon structures are useful for navigation and Roman Roads come to mind but an exact line overlay . Let the spirit of truth be with you. G 🙏✌️☝️👍✅🦊
Chcihen Itza guides in Mexico do a thing where they take you to stand in the middle of the old arena between two old walls, and clap their hands. Then move, a few feet and set the tempo, so there is no echo. They play it as magic and most of the people on the tour were (American) amazed. "How does this happen?" - "destructive interference" says me. Really basic physics, we should all know, where you are 180 degrees out of phase and the two waves cancel each other out, is the answer. Nobody wants to listen to an autistic smartarse like me, though, and prefer instead to just believe in an undefined sense of magic. I get that, and this was in the late 1990s, but this whole denial of facts is starting to take us all backwards.
The concept of destructive interference is a definitive answer to the mystery and one that's not especially easy to understand without the right background on how it works. So if they accepted what you were saying, they can no longer wonder about the cause, nor can they easily understand the answer. People are naturally curious and want to understand the world, but we have seen so much of the real picture now, that understanding all of it has become harder than any one person is capable of. So they seek mystery that can't be quantified, because then they can't be reduced back to the same position.
🤡
I am all in for science, but there’s just something about beautiful landscapes dotted with prehistoric enigmas that absolutely insists my imagination run wild.
Without an attitude of embracing scientific skepticism, it’s inevitable that my imagination begins to feel like intuition. By the time I feel like I’ve intuited something, it’s virtually indistinguishable from a sense of knowing.
And sometimes that’s actually an ok start on the journey of discovery. But it’s never the destination. No matter how tempting it may be to think so.
The destination always entails some revision to that initially inspired imagination. Often it’s a complete rewrite.
Our minds are quite an unwieldy thing to manage at times. 😂
Really beautiful content. Bravo 👏
"Why was this hill chosen to build a fort on?"
Because you can see for miles around, which means whoever built it could see attackers coming far off. It's not rocket science, dude.
I once drew a line from Edinburgh Castle, through the summit of Arthur's Seat, and continued it eastwards. It passed through Torness Point, where today there is a nuclear power station. A ley line believer stated, "Perhaps our ancestors knew that one day it would be a site of power."
Ley lines however essentially are a flat Earth belief. They may work on a flat map, but that map does not allow for curvature of the Earth. Consider that if you look up flight paths online, most are depicted as curved against a flat map. So it is that even if over just a short distance on a map, the actual Earth is curving in all directions, therefore any alleged ley line is going to be inaccurate.
Ley lines are not curved but built from straight line segments.
A pleasant surprise to see Marc on your vid as his channel covers so many of the places of my youth when I lived in England.
When I attended an agricultural college in Surrey we were taught how to use dowsing to find drainage pipes in a field and it seemed to work and it was explained that perhaps the human spinal cord could possibly detect the interruption of magnetic fields thus causing involuntary muscle movement that was indicated by the rods.
Also recall an episode of Nationwide on BBC that featured a guy that had made a device that could make lay lines on the land that he could later pick up with dowsing rods.
Nowadays I use a metal detector to find stuff but maybe I shall make a couple of dowsing rods again 😉
It's so sad to me that in the modern world, with all the hard-won knowledge of science freely available to everyone, people still fall for hocus pocus like leylines, dowsing, homeopathy, astrology, ghosts, etc, etc
If these dowsing rods tells you where the lay lines and earth energy currents are. They also use them to detect where there’s water. How would you know the differences if you’re searching for water to dig a well?
Very interesting video 👍👍
I knew it had to be something funny and ridiculous! Finally a non-BS but also respectful video on this topic!
I thought it was gonna be football stadiums....
Great vid. Great presentation, entertaining, a bit educational, bipartisan and informative. Thank you. Will look into your channel now.
If you did want someone to go, “no, it’s moronic,” on camera, I would’ve been happy to do it. You made a well-reasoned reply to a deeply unreasoned theory, mine would’ve been less reasoned and more derisory. There is (was) a well respected archaeological journal that published a paper that mixed dowsing in with scientific techniques. The editor should’ve resigned in disgrace. Important places are linked by geography and political economy which is way more interesting but it may be because archaeologists have been incapable of communicating this that rubbish is replacing it in the popular imagination.
In one paragraph you sum it up better than I did in 18 minutes. Absolutely agree, the real stories are so much more interesting.
I don't know about ley lines. However I used dowsing for years working in architecture and topographical surveys. It's a good way to find power lines, water, pipes, voids under ground especially when the ground was over grown. We used a complicated bit of kit. Bent coat hangers, it worked every time. I also knew a man who did dowsing for big companies to place wells, he travelled all over the world doing this.
It's easy to see the hands tipping in the direction the rods point. Please.
I knew an old farmer in the catskill Mountains NY who doused for water, but he also doused for earth energy fields, The BIG difference is that Mr Hull said that energy fields are dangerous to the human body. They cause cancer. You don't want to build a house or place your bed on top of one - because long term exposure is bad ( he said a bed should be placed on a north-south axis so that the earth's magnetic fields pass through the body properly). I was a skeptical college student and thought he was moving the rods, but he let me try and the rod definitely moved - pulled down. Mr Hull used willow rods, but he said wire coat hangers also work. Mr Hull never said anything about the earth's high energy spots connecting - creating Ley lines. When he doused for water, he could also tell the other farmer how far down the well would have to be drilled
Isn't it fascinating how a decide that is entirely and directly controlled by a human always does exactly what the human want's it to do...
Also: what about all the monuments, water features and whatnot that *don't* line up nicely?
hello again Paul, wow i wanted this video to go on longer, was so fascinating ,
Well. We didn't know much of anything about what ancient structures of any sort were under our feet until the invention of Lidar, did we? We didn't know Jupiter had as many moons as it does until the invention of a stronger telescope, either. Therefore, it sure seems to me that just because science hasn't figured out a means to find something, it doesn't mean that something isn't there.
To be of interest to science, something has to be testable and have a mechanism or sound theoretical basis. It also needs someone with money willing to fund the research. Or someone like Galileo. Maybe one will come along soon.
Most artfully crafted and so well composed with just the right levels of humour (humor)
Brilliant ending ❤ Interesting take on the subject. I think the comments could get fun.
I'm going into hiding shortly.
Excellent punchline, Sir, and a top video that tread carefully but made some very good points about the way ideas form and science is built. Nice work!
Once spent a whole week investigating lines we found on an OS map seized from some very naughty people, even going to the local archaeological dept of the university. Their immediate conclusion was Ley Lines, ours was “ thank goodness for that, we have saved ourselves a lot of fingertip searching” .When we returned the maps after the investigation the naughty people asked how far we’d gone investigating map, i told them such and such a street Dept of Archaeology. We all laughed, tho we had the last laugh, they all went to jail!
@7:36 I used to live in that brick extension to the Dower House. Many years ago now. Wonderful place, Greywell.
Crop circles? Von Danekin? Pyramid energy? Astrology? EVIDENCE?
No, von Däniken really does exist. There is evidence galore.
I would not lump all these together. Plenty of evidence for dowsing, read the various posts and even try it yourself.
If you look carefully, crop circles ALWAYS locate on ley lines. Well, they did until 2001.
Actually I never knew about ley lines but now I am noticing that my bed, my computer, my fridge, and my toilet are all in a straight line. And that's 99% of my day accounted for, all in a straight line, that can't be coincidental. They have to all be connected through a weird unaccounted for energy. I'll call this the efficient reclusive hermit force.
Someone made a layline map with Woolworth's stores too.
Yup. Matt Parker. I gave a hat tip to him at the end.
@@pwhitewick Thanks, I'd forgotten who it was. :)
Again, why Woolworths? What are they really saying?
@@I_Don_t_want_a_handle something about picking and mixing?
thanks for another great video. Could I ask please, when you were holding the dowsing rods what is your opinion as to the cause of the movement you experienced?
Hi Paul, thank you for this video.
As you know Alfred Watkins " trackways " were lines of sight between local sites ie. churches, barrows, etc, that he spotted on his travels.
The modern ley lines and energy lines are not really related to his work but do tie into the new age mindset. There may or may not be something to this ( you buys yer book, yer makes your own mind up 😁 )
Once again thank you for this video, I hope it makes people do a little research before just toeing the line ( ouch sorry v. bad pun 🤡🤡🤡🤡 )
Toeing the line , or lining the pockets with money handed over by the gullible?
@@philhawley1219 well that is possible, there is born every minute after all 😁, as I say do some research and make up your own mind ( no wrong answers just badly worded questions )..........
Hugely enjoyable! As someone who has personally hunted Higgs Bosons at CERN back in the day I find it great and really important that people like yourself, who have a substantial number of listeners, point these things out! Thanks!
But the Higgs boson was discovered and confirmed.
@@binkwillans5138 OK, right you are - I should have been a bit more precise: Given my history, I was really happy to see Paul point out the importance of engaging with systematic science as compared to theories that have been invented without a shred of evidence.
@@MattMesserPics Look, Matt, I really appreciate your reply, but I need to push my key issue here: there is NO such thing as a theory without evidence. Theories are defined only after testing and research to ensure the FACTS are correct and never contradicted. I agree with you tho' that this guy's rational approach to archaeology is commendable.
I think if young people were all given proper grounding in physics they wouldn't misuse words like "energy" and "force" when they are older.
Actually the biggest confusion is between 'energy' and 'power'. As an electrical/electronics engineer (retired) it really annoys me.
But these words have both scientific and non-scientific meanings. A piece of music can have energy and an army can exert force. In the same way, people believing in woo-woo will not be using these words the same way a physicist does, and there's nothing particularly wrong with that in itself.
@@selseyonetwenty4631 May the Force be with you. (And with you, also).....
@@cstacy Live long and prosper. Nanoo nanoo...
I wasnt conviced until the Greggs stored lined up. Im now sold.
If a pivot isn't perfectly vertical, a rod (or whatever) will tend to pivot
How can a pivot be vertical?
@@binkwillans5138 exactly! (though friction does play a part)
@@32shumble The point of a pivot is it resists friction.
@@binkwillans5138 Yet friction, like death and taxes, is with us always
@@32shumble So if a pivot IS perfectly vertical, then a rod (or whatever) cannot possibly pivot?
Awesome. A new pilgrimage to take, following the ancient Greggs Way. The reward will be filling and meaningful at each stop!
One place allegedly built on Ley Lines is Milton Keynes. According to the (unconfirmed) story, some of the town planners who designed it were Ley Line believers and laid the town out along them. Some of Milton Keynes' main streets are named after ancient monuments, e.g Silbury Boulevard, Avebury Boulevard, so it's vaguely plausible.
wasnt there some kind of mysterious plan behind the design of Wren's London (which didnt fully get built) and i think the NY streetplan
So there should be roundabouts everywhere that ley lines meet?
Paul, what is the Mound at 0:28 - 0:31 please, looks interesting 😍 thanks in advance to anyone with any information 🙂
The mound is Dragon Hill near the Uffington White horse.
In another amazing discovery, many great battles occurred in parks and monument sites. It's a conspiracy I tell you! :D
Just like in Australia how all the bits nominated as National Parks were the rocky, uneven, raised bits that no-one wanted as they were no good for crops or grazing. Few areas of valuable, broad, open savannah country or valley floors are preserved in their natural state.
Fascinating stuff as always,Paul, and love your 'straight line revelation ' at the end! Think I might follow that.....
You could do worse!
Fun Fact: Eric Clapton wrote the song "Ley Lines" at his home in Surrey in 1969. (joke)
I'd not be surprised
HaHaHa brilliant...
Layla! Ha ha, excellent!
Of course, it all went to pot when he opened his mouth.. and its brilliant co-writer had his ultimate psychotic episode. Jim Gordon, RIP.
Great video, Paul. Always good to see Marq as well. I’m definitely a key line sceptic but I wonder if there is something in Marq’s energy currents? I suppose it could be running water? What makes those dowsing rods turn like that?
I'll put this up there next to all the cautionary advice around bigfoot.
You can't eat leylines though?!!
The evidence for Bigfoot is very good.
XKCD applies to bigfoot.
I have noticed that my mind does a similar thing. When I have started a new job, for the first few weeks I am fixated on invoice numbers etc looking for significance or patterns, once I have properly learned the job interest in those things fades and I just go with the rhythm of the work. :)
Dowsing has to be done to be believed. It's amazing!
I tried it once and concluded it was a load of tosh.
I really enjoyed this video. It really has got some of the most interesting comments that I've ever read. That's a double 👍👍 from me!
Nice work Paul. You do the topic very well indeed
Thank you kindly
Top class summing up at the beginning about the history of this phenomenon 😀. Many call it 'snake oil' and pseudo science (I'm being polite) but many do believe. I fall between the two somewhere as there is definitely something that draws us to these monuments. I'm no expert why this should be but I think its more because they are "interesting place to visit", rather then they are on ley lines.. I stick with it as I'm always worried that there may be something of value, which by dismissing it out-of-hand, is lost to us all? 🧐