The old Saxon word ley (also spelt lea, lee or leigh) was defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Land temporarily under grass” and particularly refers to an enclosed field or pasture.

The first person to use the term as we think of it today was Alfred Watkins in his book The Old Straight Track, published in 1925 when he was seventy years old. Alfred Watkins lived in Hereford and on leaving school became an outrider or brewer’s representative which meant that he covered large areas of his native countryside around the Welsh borders.

Watkins noticed that traditionally sacred sites such as burial mounds, standing stones, earth works, beacon hills, and churches built on earlier pagan sites often seemed to be arranged in straight lines. His original interpretation of this seemed to be that these were prehistoric sight lines across the landscape; today we think of them more as earth energy lines. Dowsing on the markers placed by ancestors distanced from us by millennia of time has shown these spots have strong earth energies.