Sir,—Mr. Alfred Watkins, in his letter of February 10th
on Stane Street, asserts that “the Romans found on
landing that Britain was covered by a network of trackways made on accurately sighted alignments, sighted ages
before.” Trackways must have existed in every inhabited country from times of primitive savagery. They exist in
the African bush. But that they “covered” Britain and were made on “accurately sighted
alignments” is more than doubtful. For such work a central government is needed, and freedom from inter-tribal
warfare such as prevailed in Britain, witness the camps everywhere on our hill-tops. A would-be surveyor who stepped
over his own boundary would be pretty sure of obstacles in the shape of next-door neighbours and stone or bronze
weapons. The charming photographs in Mr. Watkins’s book, “Early British Trackways” are much better
than his arguments. His central contention is that “the sighting line was called the ley or lay … numbers of
farms and places on sighting lines bear this name, viz., the Ley Farms, Weobley. …” Archæology and
philology are becoming more and more exact sciences and dangerous to dabble in. It is etymologically certain that this
suffix means grassland and nothing else. “Lea, Lay, Ley, a meadow. Middle English lay, ley, uncultivated land.
Anglo-Saxon leáh, leá.” (Skeat.) And it is historically certain that the ley was the portion of land,
lying outside of the arable, which supplied the early English settlements with pasture and hay. What is a sober-minded
student to make of the following? “The fact of the
layley (EBT p. 30),
with its highly skilled methods, being established, it must also be a fact that such work
required skilled men, carefully trained. … Were they the laity or lay-men of Beowulf? In later days our first
English poet was one Layamon.” Trackways in Britain there may have been, but a trackway through Mr.
Watkins’s “facts” and reasoning is hard to find and follow.—Yours, &c.,
F. S. A.
Source info: Journal title in cutting; MS note by AW “Mar 3rd 1923”.