First of all, I apologise for not having read the whole of this topic, which has become rather large and which is extremely time-consuming because of the way each post has to be selected individually on this forum. I've read a substantial portion of it, though, and possibly I can add something.

I first heard about ley lines back in the seventies, when there was quite a bit of TV coverage of the idea. I thought the idea was interesting. I then read some of the literature - The View Over Atlantis and so on - and became sceptical. It seemed to me that anything could be argued by drawing arbitrary lines and playing about with numbers.

For various reasons I returned to the idea a couple of decades later, and by the 1990s I was experimenting with dowsing rods and getting some very interesting results. I'd worked for a water company and was aware that dowsing works, whatever the explanations given for it.

Of course dowsing for some vaguely defined earth energy that can't be detected by more established means is quite a different thing from dowsing for water.

I started by dowsing a ley line that I'd read about at Avebury. I got no result at all. Then the lady I was with succeeded in dowsing that line and I watched her find other lines that were described in the book I'd been reading, which she hadn't read and had barely looked at.

Two days later the rods suddenly worked for me at a site at Glastonbury.

Since then I've dowsed areas that have been dowsed by others, and verified their results, and also found other lines of energy that haven't been mentioned in anything I've read.

One of the most striking instances was when I was alone, dowsing in the grounds of Glastonbury Abbey. I met a girl I'd been talking with the day before elsewhere in Glastonbury, and she asked if she could have a go with the rods. I sent her in a straight line toward a different part of the Abbey which I'd dowsed a year of so earlier, so she hadn't seen me at work there. As she intersected the line she found the rods responding, and she turned to follow it.

She expected it to go in a straight line toward a church it appeared to head toward, and I let her find out that it didn't. I kept a few yards behind her and out of her line of vision as much as I could, so I wasn't influencing her, and I watched her follow that erratic line of energy past landmarks I'd noted previously. It goes into a crypt of the Abbey, but not through the door and down the steps. The girl found out how it passes downward at an angle through the wall a couple of feet from the doorway. I continued to be well clear of her and not indicating the line I'd traced on the previous visit.

I've had several similar experiences that certainly indicate that these energies are objective and can be detected by independent people.

The aren't exactly lines - at least, not straight ones. As someone here (Mustard I think?) commented, straight lines aren't really typical of nature. I find the lines turn, waver, eddy and so on, even turn back on themselves completely.

I think Alfred Watkins must have intuited something, but overlaid that with his own theories because he had no means to trace the actual energies. So he posited straight lines and developed theories to account for them. The Mary and Michael lines mentioned earlier in this discussion do waver and turn quite a lot, though over the course of their journey across southern Britain they follow a more or less direct course, much as some rivers do. So they're lines of a sort, like the line of a river, but they're not straight lines, and drawing straight lines on a map and thinking you've found ley lines is a hit and miss approach that isn't really to be recommended. In any case, you need some way to verify that there's something corresponding to the posited line.

I still think much of the literature is full of fantasy and bizarre guesswork. But in any case scepticism is important when dealing with something this vague and little known - so long as it's balanced and open scepticism and not blank hostility pretending to be cool objectivity.

It may be worth recalling the weird ideas people used to have about electricity and magnetism before modern scientific knowledge developed. The attaching of weird ideas doesn't necessarily invalidate the basic core of observations.

Personally, I'd welcome detailed and scientifically structured research into dowsing in general and also into ley lines.