Minecraft "power ripple"

If I understand your question correctly, here is a way of creating a "power ripple". Think of the sandstone blocks above-ground as ground level; I built it this way so it's easier to see. The circuitry would be underground.

Repeaters have an interesting property of being able to "power" blocks, causing the blocks to give power. Each Repeater in this image is powering the sandstone block in front, turning the Redstone Torch on top of them off, and is also powering the next Repeater.

When this button is pressed, the Redstone Torch turns off, causing the chain of Repeaters to slowly turn off, which also causes the Redstone Torches underneath to slowly turn on, in order.

The result is the line of Redstone Dust on the surface gradually turns on, and then gradually turns off.

I'm assuming that your goal is to power a row of closely spaced redstone-activated devices.

Any solution is going to involve:

1. some kind of alternating repeaters and redstone, because you need to insulate the adjacent wiring;
2. multiple layers to make the connections.

The below is the first solution I came up with; there's probably a more efficient one. All of the repeaters are at delay 1 except for the bottom row (delay 2) and the middle row of the upper section (delay 3). The input comes in from the bottom right (the wire you see goes to a switch I used to watch the pistons). I've verified that when connected to a row of pistons, this triggers them all at distinct evenly-spaced times.

If you want to power blocks from below, then a similar scheme ending in vertical redstone torches rather than repeaters can probably be used.

After tooling about for a bit I came up with my own method; it's similar to this answer, but with somewhat quicker setup:

(Note that this is designed to power the blocks in a trench between the two lines.)