Evening classes at Glasgow University Department of Archaeology threw no further light on the subject. Though it was only ten miles away, no one had ever heard of Duncolm. Ley-hunting was purely an English pastime, Bell was told. Like cricket, it had never quite caught on in Scotland. Its eccentric devotees were firmly classified as the lunatic fringe of archaeology, just one step removed from the Flat Earth Society.

'It would be a mistake to presume my alignments did not exist because they did not fit current archaeological theories. It would also be a mistake to presume that since they apparently do exist, they must fit one of the wide range of theories evolved by researchers who had found similar lines in England.
From what I had read in The Ley Hunter magazine and elsewhere, it seemed that most English researchers now believed their ley-lines followed invisible 'lines of force' across the country. As the only lines I had found were simple overland alignments of hilltops and ancient man-made features detected without recourse to dowsing or astronomy, I felt I could hardly call them ley-lines. They were not the same thing. Some of my alignments were in line of sight between intervisible points, others were connecting lines linking sites on different alignments - each line was joined, at an important point along its length, to another line. For this reason I classified them, in the loosest possible sense, as prehistoric communication lines. But whether this was a definition or a supposition, I was by no means certain.

In the first alignment maps I drew, I used the term PCL's - Prehistoric Communication Lines. The name proved unacceptable in archaeological debate because it implied that A, my alignments existed, and B, I knew what they had been used for. To get round this, I changed the name to PSA's - Prehistoric Site Alignments. No-one could argue with this name, because whether my lines were real or imaginary they were still prehistoric site alignments. By 'pre-historic' I meant that sites on the alignment dated to the time before recorded history in that particular area. This last part was quite important, as it gave me in theory, a wider range of acceptable dates for the sites on my alignments maps.' (Bell, Glasgow's Secret Geometry)

Looking south from Carron Ford, on the possible route of the Straight Road with No Path

One of the recurring arguments against Bell's PSA's was the fact that as far as anyone in archaeology knew, there was no record of alignments or anything of that nature in any of the old books on Glasgow. There is, however, a fairly believable account of the origins of Glasgow Cathedral. St. Mungo (aka Kentigern) is said to have led a burial procession down through the Campsie Fells to bury Fergus the holy man in a cemetery that now lies beneath the flagstones of the Cathedral crypt. Bell was curious about the route taken to the cemetery and his next step was to search for the earliest written account of St. Mungo's journey to Glasgow. He hoped that in the record of this journey there would be a clue about the nature of early roads or tracks in the Glasgow area.

'Many a tedious old volume I had to read through before I learned that when Bishop Jocelyn was rebuilding Glasgow Cathedral in the 12th Century, he had commissioned a hagiographer from Furness Abbey to revise St. Mungo's biography. Two copies of this book survive, one in the British Museum, the other in Dublin. To my delight, however, I unearthed a translated and edited version in the Glasgow Room of the Mitchell Library. In this book, The Life of S. Kentigern, I finally found what I was looking for - the earliest known reference to a road or track in the Glasgow area. It appears in the following extract from chapter nine:

'And in truth, the bulls, in no way being restive, or in anything disobeying the voice of Kentigern, without any tripping or fall, came by a straight road, along where there was no path, as far as Cathures, which is now called Glasgu ...'

I was ecstatic ... In a quiet corner of the reading room, I whispered the words over and over again to myself like a mantra, 'they came by a straight road along where there was no path'.

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