Sir,—Mr. Alfred Watkins may be weak in etymology, but if his book arouses us to the fact that there were real roads in Britain before the Roman days he has performed a service to those who value truth and apply common sense to the scanty records of the prehistoric past.
If the roads in pre-Roman Britain were negligible, what use were the horses and chariots which bulk so largely in “Celtic” poetry and in Roman and other descriptions?
The Briton had neither the steppes of the Cossacks nor the deserts of the Arabs over which he could gallop at large. His marshy valleys and thick forests must have confined his equestrian activities to his pastures and his “trackways.”
The former must have been extensive to have supported the great herds which both history and archæology prove him to have corralled in his hill-top strongholds and the latter sound enough to bear his busy traffic. The herd and the ley were probably the common property of the inhabitants under a chieftain, and grazing rights on common land and roadsides may be inheritances from that remote age. It is impossible to believe that each palisadoed stronghold was an enclave entirely cut off from its neighbours, members generally of the same tribe and the same nation. Common sense tells us that all must have been connected by roads capable of sustaining the traffic of herds, bullock transport, pack horses, and chariots. Such roads must have been deserving of a more honourable title than “Trackways.” Obviously, they would run wherever possible along the ridges, but, when necessary, why should they not have been cut straight through a forest or a swamp? They might have been “laid” out then straight from one hill-top to the other, merely deflected to skirt a mere or to reach a ford. The sighting could have been done by the smoke of bonfires.
It is manifestly absurd to deny the capacity of making roads to the people who carted enormous masses of stone to erect at Stonehenge and elsewhere from far-away sources, carried their tin from Cornwall to the Isle of Wight, prepared those dewponds which still serve upon a thousand hills, and raised up earthworks which must have required labourers by the thousand and garrisons as great.
The roads need not have been paved. Not all the Roman roads were faced with stone. The lowland portions could have been constructed of alternate layers of wattle and clay, a style of work in which our ancestors were adept, and which in modern times has been used for such important works as the railway across Chat Moss and is, at this very moment in the form of iron net and concrete, being copied in our latest London street pavements.
Philology is a dangerous guide, because names and words become not only contracted in meaning from the general to the particular, but conversely expanded, even changed in their application from one object to another or misunderstood from resemblance of sound.
It is worth noting, however, that in colloquial English to “spy out the lay of the land” is quite as common as to “see how the land lies.”
Those hundreds of places, beside the “Trackways,” now named “Coldharbour” or “Caldecott” may have been called in pre-Celtic Britain by a name that sounded like and bore a similar meaning but was derived from some “Iberian” tongue. Were they travellers’ rests? Can any philologist tell us whether the Moors or Berbers have a phrase for Caravanserai that sounds like “Coeldarber”? The nearest sound that I have been able to trace is in West Herts, a district full of “Celtic” remains and pre-Celtic natives, in the name “darber,” applied to large flints. One meaning of “coel” in Welsh is a “seat,” so could “Coeldarber” have meant originally “the rest-place built of flints”?
The Saxon might have taken this to mean his “harber” or the Norman his “auberge.” Another meaning, as in “Coel Bran”—a holy or fetish post represents the sacred idea. “Here stands a post! Who put it there? A better man than you! Touch it if you dare!” So possibly the Coeldarber was the boundary cairn of stones.
We can picture our ancient British road then passing from a stronghold along the ridgeway, with its pastures and tilled land falling away on either side to the water and swamp below, past the stone that marked the border of one domain into the territory of the next clan, and so on until the end of the ridge was reached, there dipping to the dale and making a bee-line for the next hill-top.
The straighter the road the greater the distance at which the approach of friend or foe could be observed. Finally,
Britain was always a well-timbered country and its inhabitants expert workers in wood, using it far more than stone or
any metal, yet our archæologists are always talking of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, but never of the Age of
Wood. Is it because the latter, like the poor, is always with us?—Yours, &c.,
Denis Pater.
[This correspondence is now closed.—Ed., W.W.G.]
Source info: Journal title and date in cutting.
Watkins quotes from this letter in The Old Straight Track, page 151. Despite the note at the end, the editor allowed one more letter on the ley theory.