Mr. Alfred Watkins, who is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, has published, in rather sumptuous style, a lecture which he delivered a few months ago to a Herefordshire Naturalists’ Club, on “Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps, and Sites.” The illustrations are well worth the 4s. 6d. asked for this publication. Mr. Watkins’s photographic views are admirable: his views on history, archæology, philology, placenames, and so forth, are less valuable. These things require deeper study than Mr. Watkins appears to have devoted to them. His theories about “the ley” and the evolution of all our trackways, mounds, camps and sites are quite original, but will not bear serious investigation. On place-names—a treacherous quagmire—Mr. Watkins naturally comes to grief. It is amusing to be told, for instance, that Winsley means “the road by which wines were brought.” Mr. Watkins has a theory that the “ley-men” (who remind me of spirit-photographs), were “men of knowledge” who perhaps became bards and soothsayers and degenerated into the witches of the Middle Ages. The people of Bromley, in Essex, will be interested by his exciting suggestion as to the meaning of “Bromley”:
“Folk-lore provides the witches with the power of riding through the air on a broomstick. They (in imagination) flew over the Broomy Hills and the Brom-leys. It may be that the ancient sighting methods were condemned as sorcery by the early Christian missionaries. Were they the laity or laymen of Beowulf?”
By this sample one may guess that Mr. Watkins is original and does not stick at trifles.
Mr. Watkins has discovered in the Oxford Dictionary that in the sixteenth century there was a word “Cole” which (though even this is doubtful) is supposed to have meant “a false magician” or juggler. From this he spins a web of theories, and in this web he catches Colchester, interpreting it, I gather, as the camp of the false magician. This is a delightful derivation which kindles the imagination. But the ancient names of Colchester—Colonia Victricensis, Colonia, Colon Ceastre, and Colne ceastre—have to be reckoned with. Almost all Mr. Watkins’s queer surmises centre round the word “ley,” which, instead of meaning meadow or pasture, was (as he has discovered), a mystic sighting-line whereby the lay-out of roads, mounds and camps was decided. “Cole-staff” or “cowl-staff” was, in his opinion, “originally the working sighting staff of the cole-man, who was the magician of the keyRead ‘ley’ (EBT p. 31).”
Source info: MS note by AW “Essex County Standard Mar 18 1922”.