The idea that sacred and ancient sites lie along invisible lines of power is one of the most widely held in the current, and its history is a clear case of a claim changing under a later hand.
The term ley line was coined by Alfred Watkins, a Herefordshire brewer and amateur antiquarian, in The Old Straight Track (1925). Watkins proposed something entirely down-to-earth: that ancient Britons had laid out straight trackways between landmarks, hilltops, standing stones, churches on older sites, for travel and sighting, and that these alignments could still be traced on a map. He made no claim of energy of any kind. The archaeological objection to even this modest version is statistical: given the density of old sites in the British landscape, apparent alignments of three or four points are exactly what chance produces, and rigorous tests bear that out.
The energy version is a later graft. In The View Over Atlantis (1969), John Michell fused Watkins's lines with Chinese feng shui and its 'dragon lines' and with earlier speculation about earth currents, and produced the ley line as a channel of subtle energy connecting power-places, the form in which almost everyone now knows it. From there the vocabulary multiplied: the planetary grid, a proposed global lattice of such lines and nodes, was elaborated in the 1980s; vortexes, sites of concentrated upwelling energy, became attached above all to Sedona, Arizona, where the term was popularised around 1980 by Page Bryant.
Portal dates are the calendar version of the same intuition, and are almost entirely a recent, internet-era phenomenon. The best known is the Lion's Gate, dated to the eighth of August (8/8) and tied to the heliacal rising of the star Sirius and to the numerology of the number eight, promoted as a day when a cosmic 'portal' opens and intentions carry special force. Eclipse dates and repeating-number dates function similarly. None of these has a pre-modern pedigree as a portal; they are contemporary coinages that borrow the authority of astronomy and of old sacred geography without the substance of either.