Ghost Paths
On sale
1st April 2027
Price: £22
Genre
‘Hilarious and equally awe-inspiring . . . surely his masterpiece’
Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth
‘A crazy zip-wire ride through the totally wyrd world of leylines and all the wonderful weirdness they have inspired, this is Travis Elborough at his masterly best’ Philip Hoare
Wherever you go in Britain, you travel not in three dimensions, but in four. . . the fourth dimension is the past.
Faint traces of a far older world often lie just beneath our feet. Our landscape is haunted, its phantoms omnipresent and our countryside studded with markers of ancient rites and rituals whose meaning and purpose have become hazy with the passing of time. But could there be some underlying pattern to explain the siting of sacred sites?
The Herefordshire brewer Alfred Watkins certainly thought so, when in a blinding flash on 30 June 1921, he suddenly saw a hidden network of prehistoric tracks – ‘a fairy chain’ of alignments that ‘stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could see’ that he called ‘leys’.
Almost instantly dismissed by the archeological establishment who dubbed Watkins a crank, his idea captured the public imagination and ley hunting became a craze, championed as a new health-giving outdoor activity. His book, The Old Straight Track, would become a bible for those seeking to unlock the earth’s greatest mysteries for generations, as others soon saw something occult, Druidic, supernatural and even interplanetary in leylines.
In Ghost Paths, Travis Elborough, the award-winning author of Atlas of Vanishing Places, undertakes a spellbinding journey into the esoteric world and the curious life and times of ley lines with Watkins’ concept resonating with believers in sunken civilisations and King Arthur’s Camelot, Glastonbury mystics, twig-wielding dowsers, UFO-spotters, dope-smoking counter cultural revolutionaries, spiritually-minded festival founders, science fiction writers, outsider artists, furniture designers, underground filmmakers, hippy and post-punk musicians, coastal gardeners and urban town planners.
Empathetic and entertaining, this is pop cultural history at its most uncanny, Elborough a spirit guide to a peculiar yesterday that still speaks to us today amid a revival of interest in the wyrd lore of the land.
‘Fascinating and hugely entertaining . . . Travis Elborough is the perfect spirit guide, leading us along that thin line between wry scepticism and genuine enchantment’ Jake Arnott
Cathi Unsworth, author of Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth
‘A crazy zip-wire ride through the totally wyrd world of leylines and all the wonderful weirdness they have inspired, this is Travis Elborough at his masterly best’ Philip Hoare
Wherever you go in Britain, you travel not in three dimensions, but in four. . . the fourth dimension is the past.
Faint traces of a far older world often lie just beneath our feet. Our landscape is haunted, its phantoms omnipresent and our countryside studded with markers of ancient rites and rituals whose meaning and purpose have become hazy with the passing of time. But could there be some underlying pattern to explain the siting of sacred sites?
The Herefordshire brewer Alfred Watkins certainly thought so, when in a blinding flash on 30 June 1921, he suddenly saw a hidden network of prehistoric tracks – ‘a fairy chain’ of alignments that ‘stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak, as far as the eye could see’ that he called ‘leys’.
Almost instantly dismissed by the archeological establishment who dubbed Watkins a crank, his idea captured the public imagination and ley hunting became a craze, championed as a new health-giving outdoor activity. His book, The Old Straight Track, would become a bible for those seeking to unlock the earth’s greatest mysteries for generations, as others soon saw something occult, Druidic, supernatural and even interplanetary in leylines.
In Ghost Paths, Travis Elborough, the award-winning author of Atlas of Vanishing Places, undertakes a spellbinding journey into the esoteric world and the curious life and times of ley lines with Watkins’ concept resonating with believers in sunken civilisations and King Arthur’s Camelot, Glastonbury mystics, twig-wielding dowsers, UFO-spotters, dope-smoking counter cultural revolutionaries, spiritually-minded festival founders, science fiction writers, outsider artists, furniture designers, underground filmmakers, hippy and post-punk musicians, coastal gardeners and urban town planners.
Empathetic and entertaining, this is pop cultural history at its most uncanny, Elborough a spirit guide to a peculiar yesterday that still speaks to us today amid a revival of interest in the wyrd lore of the land.
‘Fascinating and hugely entertaining . . . Travis Elborough is the perfect spirit guide, leading us along that thin line between wry scepticism and genuine enchantment’ Jake Arnott
Reviews
This is the tale of a track forged 100-years-ago in Wessex by motor enthusiast Alfred Watkins across the sacred byways of Albion. A notion he called leylines that set the British imagination about our ancient past aflame and crossed all social divides, creating visionaries, sages and deadly rivalries. A path that led into the acid-fried Sixties with dragons and UFOs appearing over Glastonbury, the festival and its Pyramid stage, through the counter-culture and out the other end with punk Magus, Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman, saving the world from a glacier in Iceland. A cast of a thousand eccentrics are corralled and their legends retold and retramped by the hilarious and equally awe-inspiring Travis Elborough, in what surely is his masterpiece
A fascinating and hugely entertaining look at how a New Age came into being. Ghost Paths compellingly charts that curiously British landscape stretching from the comically mundane to the deeply sacred. And Travis Elborough is the perfect spirit guide, leading us along that thin line between wry scepticism and genuine enchantment
A crazy zip-wire ride through the totally wyrd world of leylines and all the wonderful weirdness they have inspired, this is Travis Elborough at his masterly best