"Keep your eyes open when cycling or motoring on a bit of straight road for any hill point or mound, church or castle on a bank, which is not only straight in front, but keeps fixed in the same position as you travel; for such an observation almost certainly leads to the discovery of a ley through the point and on the road."                                                        Alfred Watkins, The Old Straight Track, 1925.

These words of Alfred Watkins come to mind on the Humbie Road between Eaglesham and Newton Mearns, in a quiet corner of the world some seven miles south of Glasgow.

The first clue to a possible prehistoric origin for this stretch of road occurs when the road swerves to avoid Bonnyton Mound then continues on in exactly the same direction on the other side. Modern roads avoid obstacles, so this suggests that the road might be built over a track which went straight to the mound on purpose.
This road has already been straightened. In 1825 it was re-routed through a burial mound it had previously run round at Crosslees Farm, and a cremation urn retrieved, apparently found inside a stone burial cist.
The cist cover slab is incorporated into a drystone dyke on the north side of the road.

The mound is known locally as the Deil's Plantin, or Devil's Plantation (NS 557 535). Carry on in the same direction and in the distance you will see the spire of Mearns Parish Kirk which is also built on a mound. A board on the outside wall states that the church was founded in 800 AD.
The alignment passes through the site of the old Mearns Cross which stood on common ground till the village green was bisected by the Kilmarnock road in 1832.
A mile beyond this, in private land, stand the remains of an earthwork and part of the foundations of Pollock Castle on a high and conspicuous position on the point of a rocky ridge. This was the ancient seat of the Pollocks of Pollock who trace their ancestry to Fulbert de Pollock in the 12th century.
The terminal point of the alignment in the other direction is Ardoch Rig, a small, wooded hill eight miles SE of Pollock Castle.

In 1980, according to everyone I knew in Scottish archaeology, this alignment was purely coincidental. Nevertheless, I felt that it would be a mistake to presume my alignments did not exist because they did not fit current archaeological theories. It would also be a mistake to presume that since they apparently do exist, they must fit one of the wide range of theories evolved by researchers who had found similar lines in England.
From what I had read in The Ley Hunter magazine and elsewhere, it seemed that most English researchers now believed their ley-lines followed invisible 'lines of force' across the country. As the only lines I had found were simple overland alignments of hilltops and ancient man-made features detected without recourse to dowsing or astronomy, I felt I could hardly call them ley-lines. They were not the same thing. Some of my alignments were in line of sight between intervisible points, others were connecting lines linking sites on different alignments - each line was joined, at an important point along its length, to another line.

On the first alignment maps I drew, I used the term PCL's - Prehistoric Communication Lines. The name proved unacceptable in archaeological debate because it implied that A, my alignments existed, and B, I knew what they had been used for. To get round this, I changed the name to PSA's - Prehistoric Site Alignments. No-one could argue with this name, because whether my lines were real or imaginary they were still prehistoric site alignments. 'Pre-historic' meaning that the site was occupied before historical records were kept in that particular area. Even if the structure occupying a site is Medieval, the site itself can be very much older.

The third, and last, Leyline Publications offering to the public was Glasgow's Secret Geometry (ISBN 0-9506219-1-9); first published in 1984, and the only one of the three books still in print. Without the UFOs and New Age sensationalism nobody noticed it except the dowsing societies. Many of their members had read books on energy lines and wondered if PSAs were the same thing, so a summer outing was arranged to introduce them to the subject. We met at the Eglinton Arms in Eaglesham, 'tuned up' at the Moot Hill on the village green, then set off along the Humbie Road alignment.

It was a great day out. As soon as we hit the Humbie Road every short pendulum, every long pendulum, every angle rod and every forked spring rod of the eighteen dowsers present pointed straight up that road! The instruments whirled like spinning tops in the ancient circular churchyard of Mearns Parish Kirk (one man was so overcome with 'the vibes' that he had to leave the party); energy lines whizzed off across the landscape in all directions from the nearby Craw Stane and both clockwise and anticlockwise spirals were detected around the cup-marked rocks at Carlin Crags.
It was fun, but if I had redrawn each line the dowsers discovered on a 1:25;000 scale map with a pencil, the map would have been absolutely solid with graphite.

On to The Dowsing Response.

Back to the Confessions of a New Age Publisher.

Back to the Home Page.