It was a great pleasure to hear Mr. Alfred Watkins, of exposure meter fame, lecture on a subject on which he has become one of the foremost authorities in this country of recent years. He has devoted himself to studying the trackways of the early Britons: and for the benefit of other people he has illustrated them by photographs, chiefly taken in his own county of Hereford and in Shropshire and Radnor. His principal contention is that pre-Roman mounds or cairns and cuttings and moats and camps and marked stones were in straight lines: and this he proves to quite an uncanny extent by drawing intersecting lines across ordnance maps. The Romans were not the first to introduce the “street” into Britain. The most primitive inhabitants of these islands went on the straight track, no matter how precipitous the height nor how rough the level over which it carried them. It is strange, too, how old churches, which were often built on sites once used for pagan worship, come into line with one another. A line can, of course, be drawn between any two objects, and if three objects are in a straight line it may be an accident; but four or five or more stretching across the country appeared in Mr. Watkins’s examples. The subject also raises the interesting question of place names. Thus “White” used in combination in a place name relates to the old salt ways—the tracks along which the early Briton went in search of that indispensable ingredient—and “Red” relates to pottery.
Source info: MS note by AW “A.P May 12”; journal named in duplicate at 109a.