Review of EBT

Mr. Alfred Watkins, whose name is gratefully remembered by many amateur photographers, has published a little book on “Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps, and Sites” (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 4s. 6d. net), in which he attempts to establish the principles and methods by which ancient peoples “laid out” this country in the first instance. He thinks that from Neolithic times all trackways were in straight lines across country, the line being guided from mountain peak to mountain peak, or by lower heights in flat districts, and he maintains that all or practically all mounds, camps, ancient churches, crosses, and—if we understand him aright in some rather oblique references—even ponds, lie on these lines. Such a line was called a “lay” or “ley”—hence the familiar element of place names. Menhirs, wayside crosses, market-stones, and even big trees all fall into the alignment. So he goes on to reconstruct, with a lofty superiority to philology, the whole science of place-names. The photographic pictures in the book are excellent—far better than the archæology.