Mr. Alfred Watkins’s lecture on Early British Trackways in Herefordshire has just been published in the form of a superbly illustrated (his own reproduced photographs) monograph. The lecture, originally delivered at the Woolhope Club, is to be repeated by Mr. Watkins in the Hereford Town Hall on Tuesday, April 4th, under the auspices of the Herefordshire Photographic Society, the Mayor in the chair.
Mr. Watkins’s theory of a method by which in this country, antecedent to its occupation by the Romans with their splendid system of military roads, the ancient British tribes treked or tracked their way from place to place, linking up camp with camp, township with township, over immense distances of marsh and forest and mountain, unswervingly and geometrically, is as wonderful in its inception as it is fascinating as a feasible hypothesis. But Mr. Watkins has long since left the hypothetical stage. His lecture is a full exposition of the faith that is within him, for in it he, by means of his camera, reveals a number and a variety of the old landmarks, tumps, mounds, sighting-points, radiating and diverging pathways, trenches, sections of causeway, and what not. Giant oak trees, enormous stones, specific features in a landscape, were all used as permanent across-country indicators. By these the traveller directed his land course much in the same way as the prehistoric navigators steered their rude trading ships or war craft by the constellations of the stars.
Mr. Watkins, as a Fellow and medallist of the Royal Photographic Society, as an archæologist, an antiquarian, and an inventor, is, to our mind, the greatest of contemporary Herefordians. We hope the Town Hall will be packed on the occasion of his lecture. We heard him at the Woolhope Club and were amazed at the ingenuity of his conjectures and the marvellous way in which he, by place names still current, and by point and peak still visible, gave chapter and verse for his conclusions.
Source info: Not stated; text suggests Hereford; looks like Hereford Times.