After reading the Old Straight Track, I investigated the probabilities of straight lines between, as near as I could make them, random points. I counted out the number of rice grains (round) that Watkins had sites in his argument, and dropped them from standing on a large piece of paper, plotted the positions carefully, and started hunting. I exceeded the numbers of three and four point lines that he had found before I got bored. The problem with Britain is that the landscape is very busy, full of features which might be significant. If there is anything natural in leylines they should be as common in less inhabited regions. Has anyone looked?

On dowsing for water, I found very interesting a book which gave a method for finding the depth that seemed to relate to the relationship between depth and the distances at which geophysical anomalies can be detected. This seemed to suggest that there same, or similar, phenomena were concerned.

I know that it is possible for the brain (mine, at least) to produce micro-muscular movements in an arm holding a pendulum by bypassing the conscious "I will move my arm" method and going for the "this pendulum will move anticlockwise" thought - or any other movement, to and fro in any direction, to and fro rotating, so I would expect dowsing to work, if it does, by influence on the brain. I don't have a problem with dowsing for water or any other physical feature, on site. Water diviners wouldn't be employed if they didn't have a better than random success rate - even if it is due to a better than average ability to read the landscape. I've actually had reactions myself. Once outside a megalithic barrow in Kent, where the owner of the site said there was a stream outside the entrance, and where I didn't want it to happen! It wasn't a very good test, not being blind. The other was at the Pennine Mining Museum in Matlock, Derbyshire, where they had stuff under the floor.

I'm not happy with remote dowsing. There seems no physical reason for it to work. In the same way, there seems no reason for dowsing non-physical features as leylines seem to be to work.

As for leylines being ancient, and natural, they would have to be very odd indeed to survive as straight lines. We may not be California, but Britain is not seismically dead. We are affected by small scale tectonic effects, uplift and subsidence, and there is evidence of changes in river direction caused by such effects on recent, post glacial, land surfaces. What would keep a leyline straight on an active surface? Or above a still active deeper layer? Geology is not a thing of straight lines - there are straightish features, true, but the Earth is irregular and in motion.

The suggestion that they were part of an ancient semaphore/heliograph system is attractive. One that had occurred to me in the past, but has the problem that many of the sites are not on hilltops.

Penny