Ancient Mysteries no. 17, October 1980 (continuation of Journal of Geomancy)
{17}
This project began as an attempt to do follow-up work on Watkins’s little-known book Archaic Tracks Round Cambridge, published in 1932, and his last completed book. In it, he described many leys around Cambridge which he had studied during a holiday visiting his son Allen, who was working in Cambridge at the time. We published a full list of the leys in The Journal of Geomancy (Vol 3 No. 4, available at 60p from IGR at Address, Bar Hill, Cambs). {18}
Subsequent work on the leys has shown them to be in the main bad lines. The majority of his lines when worked out at a scale of 1:25000 or above do not pass through all the points he states. And here we have another anomaly. If we read The Old Straight Track, Early British Trackways or The Ley Hunter’s Manual we see an insistence upon certain strict criteria for points, classes of site and type of alignment. Here, in his Cambridge study, Watkins abandons these criteria for a slipshod and rough method, basing his work (we believe) on a small scale map-only study, probably Bartholomew’s ½ inch to the mile series (Has anyone out there in geomancy land a ½″ Bartholomew map of the Cambridge district, circa 1930?). He uses alignments of farms, which turn out not to be aligned with the other sites he states in any case. Modern boundary stones, a footpath diverted in 1860 when a railway was built, a crossroads that is only a crossroads on small-scale maps etc.
We hope to publish a full list of our findings at a later date, and also wish to point out that we do not consider the principle of leys, ‘heilige linien’, grand geometric lines etc. to be jeopardized by this work. Watkins was an aging man when he wrote the book and its hurried manner makes one assume that he wished to rush it out before his nearing demise, which in fact did not occur for another 3 years. However, a final irony has made the classic test case for those who think geomancy can be disproved by statistics. After World War II, a cemetery for the fallen servicemen of the United States forces was made at Madingley, northwards of the city of Cambridge. In about 1947, a chapel was erected there on a ley published in Archaic Tracks. Now although they ley does not fulfil our criteria for leys (or even Watkins’s original criteria, linking farms) {19} the chapel is on a published ley, and knowing the geomantic tendencies of other post-World War II memorials (eg. Maufe’s Runnymede memorial to the Royal Air Force or the memorial to the Poles murdered by the Russians at Katyn in 1940 erected in London’s Gunnersbury Cemetery), the American Cemetery Chapel was obviously deliberately erected on a ‘known ley’. Thus a piece of modern geomancy exists on an erroneously-defined site, make of that as ye will.