Sir,—F.S.A. expresses a frank disbelief in the system of straight-sighted trackways in early Britain first expounded in my book.
My central contention was not that the track was called the ley (for this is a mere side issue), but that mounds, moats, ponds, and mark-stones align, and that precisely on these straight lines are to be found to-day fragments of ancient and modern tracks exactly conforming. This is either true or a mare’s nest. If true, it has to be explained.
The book was sent to press within five months of my first discovery of the system, and a few of the place-name conclusions I find to be hasty and lame. But another year’s strenuous work on the tracks fully confirms all its main framework, and I could easily give now five times the data and illustration I did then. Fortunately also, I receive from actual observers all over the kingdom confirmation in their own districts.
Even F.S.A. would, I think, be convinced if he could have seen with me the actual evidence found in my field surveys. I give in brief two instances out of dozens.
A few weeks ago I stood on a tumulus on the narrow ridge of the Malvern range opposite Malvern Wells, commanding, as all such mounds do, long distance views in opposite directions. Two or three miles away, over the Worcestershire plain, two lengths of separate roads could be seen accurately sighted to my feet, and therefore converging. Lines on the Ordnance map confirmed this, the one straight piece being 1¼ miles long, and the other ¾ miles long, both now leading ultimately to Upton-on-Severn. The mound could be seen as a pimple on the sky line from both tracks. In another instance I marked on the map a pencil line representing a ley inferred from seeing a trackway over a meadow conforming to the line of an ancient Hereford street. The ley goes up to Beggar’s Bush cross road and Cascob Church, Radnorshire. At the first I find, on visiting it, an unmistakable mark-stone, and the tower of the church actually built in an obvious tumulus, the top of which is half-way up the nave walls. At another point on the line I find a long and deep V-shaped sighting trench up the hill to Wormsley Court, at another point a mark-stone in a meadow.
No doubt philology advances—there is room for it, as its professors are apt to forget that the period during which words were spoken in Britain but not written, was a longer one than the period of written language. The fact that the word now spelt “ley” indicated meadow in Anglo-Saxon times was a late development in the history of the word, not a primary meaning.
The contribution of archæology to the knowledge of our prehistoric trackways is represented by a blank sheet of paper, and Mr. A. H. Allcroft in his “Earthwork of England” states that it is much the same case in the matter of the history of our prehistoric camps, with regard to which F.S.A. makes an inaccurate guess.
Until this is remedied, it is a little previous for professed archæologists to speak of their “exact
science,” and to warn off any real investigator as being a dangerous dabbler.—Yours, &c.,
Alfred Watkins.
Hereford, March 9th, 1923.
Source info: Journal named in cutting; MS note “ISSUE OF MAR 17 1923”.