“EARLY BRITISH TRACKWAYS.” By Alfred Watkins, 4s. 6d. net. Hereford: The Watkins Meter Co. London: Simpkin Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., Ltd.
This is a very interesting book embodying a lecture given last Autumn to the members of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club at Hereford by Mr. Alfred Watkins, who was president of the club in 1919. It is copiously illustrated with maps, photographs, and sketches, and a full index for references. It is an exposition of certain ideas which struck the author in the course of his peregrinations in Herefordshire and the bordering counties concerning the origin of various striking features of the country and their original purpose, which had not previously been treated from his point of view. After much consideration he came to regard them as signposts along the trackways of the inhabitants in the remote past, when there was much movement by them in groups of families and tribesmen between points far apart, and those movements had to be made along tracks through heavily wooded regions, which radiated from different centres as far as they could in comparatively straight lines. Along these lines were constructed at the most suitable sites camps, mounds, moats, with great trees or clumps of trees at points between these sites of settlement and refuge for safe direction. Many beautiful photographs are produced of these things, and the maps at the end of the work enable one to see how Mr. Watkins surveyed the different areas and coupled the distinctive works along definite radii to a few common centres. The treatment is certainly original, and the suggestions of the author will no doubt receive attention from other associations of naturalists and antiquarians in their investigations of mounds, barrows, and other typographical features of special character. That our ancestors of twenty or thirty centuries ago found it necessary to provide directing posts of some sort for their movements through dense forests, where merely beaten tracks were so easily obliterated by animals and weather conditions, is a very reasonable proposition.
Source info: MS note by AW “Merthyr Express June 24th”.