`The map availability theory is an interesting one, and worth considering. This whole thing dates to the early days of the ramblers, and the recreational interest in the landscape (as opposed to those too busy trying to live in it) On finding ley-lines, it took me a while to hunt it down, but this is a passage I remembered from John Crowley's excellent novel Ægypt:  Star temples and ley-lines, UFOs and landscape giants, couldn't they see what was really, permanently astonishing was the human ability to keep finding these things? Let anyone looking for them be given a map of Pennsylvania or New Jersey or the Faraways, and he will find ``ley-lines``; let human beings look up long enough on starry nights and they will see faces staring down at them. That's the interesting thing, that's the subject: not why there are ley-lines, but why people find them...   Actually I think the point of the statistical argument was that proponents quote extremely low probabilities that the alignments that they find could have arisen by chance: but out of the set of all possible alignments selected from (semi-)random points, there will be a number (perhaps a majority) of low probability ones.. ``Million to one chances turn up nine times out of ten``.   00:07 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)  `