The Kinrowan Estate has myriad ley lines, minor and major ones alike. I’m not sure if they are the reason that the Estate was originally settled but it certainly explains the long, eldritch history of the Estate. So let me talk about that history …
The first folks that noted there were ley lines here, at least according to Journals in the Estate Library, were the hedge witches who mapped them out by noticing that certain forest paths followed straight lines even though that was not the easiest way to get from a certain point to another point. And even the Estate corvids tended to fly along these lines when hunting.
One of the early Stewards who spent his spare time documenting the dolmens discovered that the hedge witches at that time believed that those structures were situated where three or more ley lines formed a node of magical energy. According to his journal, he wasn’t quite comfortable with that idea, but then he was a Scots Presbyterian in the seventeenth century, a Church not known for its freethinkers.
A much more liberal Steward, two centuries later, had his hedge witch document all the ley lines and with the assistance of the Several Annies, our Library Apprentices, she did so. What it showed was this Estate is like a series of interconnected spider webs, each a web of ley lines that exist within this Estate with a much, much smaller number that go outside of our borders.
Disturbingly, a number of the major ley lines intersected the barrow-mounds, where those with The Sight and the Estate Russian wolfhounds veer away without even noticing they’re doing so. Now Iain, who has The Sight, claims that at least one of those barrow-mounds is the restless grave of some ancient evil he thinks was a god who fed off death, particularly that of the battlefield. Something far worse than The Morrigan was at her most bloody.
He also claimed the strong magical energy of those major ley lines was the only thing keeping that evil from awakening, and that scared him. He doubted that any magician, even a necromancer, could break those bindings but he fervently hoped no one ever did.
In my mind the question is, what purpose have the dolmens which are scattered about the grounds here? Were they the sites of sacrifices to gods long forgotten? Were they used to strengthen the magic of the ley lines so hedge witches and others could use them? No one knows and there’s not been any archaeological digs at any of the dolmens on the Estate for centuries now, and I doubt that’ll change anytime soon.
