The diagram and excerpt below is accredited to the following link: http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps
“As knowledge in Britain of the indigenous, but recently extinct Woolworths chain of stores recedes from living memory, its reputation will undoubtedly shift from the mundane to the legendary. To aid the rapid rise of its legend, Matthew Parker produced this baffling pattern, based on the location of a dozen Woolworths stores centred on the Midlands.
Connecting the dots between 12 former Woolworths locations, ranging from Conwy in north Wales to Luton, north of London, and Monmouth in the Welsh Borders to Alfreton, south of Sheffield, provides us with an intriguing geometric figure - so symmetrical that it simply has to be meaningful in some hidden, esoteric way…
While in fact all it proves is that it’s quite easy to produce seemingly meaningful patterns, given a large enough sample of data (in this case: the locations of over 800 former Woolworths stores).
This is a return to the original criticism of Alfred Watkins’ original ley lines theory. As writes Matthew Johnson in ‘Archaeological Theory: An Introduction’:
“Ley lines do not exist. This was shown by Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy in Ley Lines in Question, which analysed such lines statistically and showed that the density of archaeological sites in the British landscape is so great that a line drawn through virtually anywhere will ‘clip’ a number of sites.”
