Ley lines

Chance alignments

Watkins's discovery happened at a time when Ordnance Survey maps were being marketed for the leisure market, making them reasonably easy and cheap to obtain; this may have been a contributing factor to the popularity of ley line theories.

Given the high density of historic and prehistoric sites in Britain and other parts of Europe, finding straight lines that "connect" sites (usually selected to make them "fit") is trivial, and ascribable to coincidence. The diagram to the right shows an example of lines that pass very near to a set of random points: for all practical purposes, they can be regarded as nearly "exact" alignments. For a mathematical treatment of this topic, see alignments of random points.

Since the existence of alignments themselves are not controversial, analysis can proceed by an attempted rejection of the null hypothesis that ley-line-like alignments are due to random chance. Statistical analysis by skeptics of this hypothesis shows that random chance is consistent with the evidence.[8][9] Some Chaos Magicians[who?] claim such results to be in accord with their generative view of chance, though such alternative null hypothesis explanations are usually deprecated on philosophical grounds in hypothesis testing due to considerations of falsifiability and Occam's razor