Sir,
My letter in your last issue did not aim to give all the evidence I have available on the points I mentioned. Space forbade that, and my book on Early British Trackways was written (probably with many faulty place-name surmises) to explain and introduce this new framework for investigation.
As regards the Bowley place-names I mentioned, Canon Bannister (Place-names of Herefordshire) gives this same Bowley as being Bolelei in Domesday Book; and there is another ancient Bowley Lane in Herefordshire. Looking up the bol or bole place-names, I went to Bollingham (no old forms available) to find the bol, not recorded in map or record. But there it was, a conical tumulus in a shrubbery, close to chapel and house, with a summerhouse and a dovecot on its apex. I investigated Bolitree, sometimes called a “castle”; the house is raised a little as if on a mound, and round it are traces of a moat.
My deductions about the meaning of the “red,” “white,” and other place-names have not started as a theory, as critics assume. I was not thinking about place-names at all until I found the straight tracks I had discovered (sighted over moats, mounds, etc.) also linked up in some cases place-names of one type. I should have been glad if place-names could have been kept out of the investigation altogether, but it was impossible, as they shout out to the investigator information which he cannot ignore.
Of course, the truth of what I pointed out all hangs upon the question whether straight-sighted prehistoric trackways really existed. I do not expect this to be fully accepted until well confirmed; and fortunately it is already receiving full confirmation from other observers—Mr. W. A. Dutt, of Lowestoft, author of Highways and Byways in East Anglia, for an instance.
Ought we not to recognise that a keen topographical knowledge and insight is not always joined in the same person with a skilled knowledge of words and their roots in the scholar’s sense; and that, again, academic conclusions are often absurdly wrong for want of the special knowledge of the place, as well as that of the name? Here co-operation might score.
Yours, etc.,
Hereford,Alfred Watkins.
November 3, 1922.
[Owing to lack of space we have unavoidably had to hold over to the January No. a most important letter from Prof. Mawer in answer to the above letter.]
Source info: Found in library.
This letter from Watkins is not in the cuttings book, but it is part of his mild controversy with the place-name authority Allen Mawer.