Journal of Geomancy vol. 2 no. 4, July 1978
{105}
In recent years, alignment theories have been subjected, quite rightly, to a rigorous reappraisal: the statistical probability of leys, the accuracy of alignments, the mathematical suppositions, the metrology and psychic associations have all been challenged.
Certain anti-ley arguments only annoy the serious researcher. No amount of statistical sophistry can detract from the evidence experienced ley-hunters have found not just on the map but in the field, no amount of quibbling can deny the geometric relationships discovered by geomantic researchers. But all of us who have come to accept the basic fact of alignments and geomantic figures must, as Journal of Geomancy contributors stress time and time again, treat research as accurately as possible; sometimes it isn’t possible, as we know when we try applying scientific techniques to dowsing work.
The problem also is that geomantic research is new and exciting, the sheer lack of much detailed work in the past meaning that every researcher is exploring relatively new ground. The temptation to overstate the argument, to exceed the bounds of verifiable fact, to colour the evidence, is difficult to resist in the excitement of discovery. It’s this problem I want to deal with here.
The problem is further enhanced simply because there is an unscientific, a poetic nature to geomantic research. The essential thing, after all those straight lines, vesicae piscibus, polygons, metrology and mathematics, is that all this is to show something about the mind of ancient man and his perception of the Cosmos, something about the capabilities of ancient man that we know little about. There is behind it all some valuable truth, a truth we’re all trying to discover.
This doesn’t mean we can’t be accurate. Grandiose concepts such as the St. Michael ley from Cornwall to East Anglia, the great isosceles triangle based on Arbor Low, west and east dragon leys, and so on, have been shown to be faulty. But as far as I’m concerned, and the same goes for most of us, I’m sure, none of this invalidates theories of ley-centres, dragon–St. Michael associations, long-distance leys, landscape geometry or zodiacs. But it does show how easy it is to get carried away by the romance of geomantic theory.
I now come to an instance of just how geomantic research can get romanticized and coloured to the extent that the value of the work gets distorted out of all recognition. And yet it’s a piece of writing that to many symbolizes ley-line theory, the cornerstone of many people’s perception of the subject.
The writer is John Michell. And I trust that this analysis of just a few of his sentences will in no way detract from the importance of his work in general. As I said, the passage in question is one on which much future work on by theory turned; it is an essential ingredient in one school of thought.
Michell undoubtedly is the man responsible for rekindling interest in the writings {106} of Alfred Watkins for, while long-time ley-hunters have been working away since the formation of the Straight Track Postal Club in the 1920s, Michell actually got into print – and not just in obscure journals but with a book, his first, called Flying Saucer Vision and published in 1967. The link between ufos and leys was not new but Michell had the imagination, the scholarship and the literary skill to give leys an interpretation that would catch the mood of the times.
What was worrying was that Michell’s poetic prose and lack of attention to detail (odd in someone obsessed with figures) distorted Watkins. It made ley-lines appeal on the same level as instant nirvana, acid trips and Oz. But it worked, of course: ley-lines and Alfred Watkins were taken up with unbridled enthusiasm by thousands who’d never looked at an ordnance survey map and who hitherto thought the only thing Hereford had produced was bulls. What it did at the same time was create an instant mythology for the whole ley-line theory.
Actually, in Flying Saucer Vision, there is no suggestion of mystery in his description of Watkins’ rediscovery of ley-lines: “In the course of visiting ancient sites in Herefordshire (Mr. Watkins) remarked that many of the sites could be joined together by drawing a straight line on the map,” Michell wrote. It was simple and reasonably accurate although Watkins doesn’t actually say he was visiting ancient sites (though it’s possible, as we’ll see).
But by View over Atlantis (1969), the description was not only inaccurate but considerably more colourful: “One hot summer afternoon in the early 1920‘s, Alfred Watkins was riding across the Bredwardine Hills about 12 miles west of Hereford. On a high hilltop he stopped, meditating on the view below him. Suddenly, in a flash, he saw something which no-one in England had seen for perhaps thousands of years.”
And by 1972, when Michell wrote the introduction to the Garnstone Press edition of OST, this had been refined to “Riding across the hills near Bredwardine, he pulled up his horse to look at the landscape below. At that moment he became aware of a network of lines, standing out like glowing wires all over the country.”
The elements of Michell’s version of Watkins’s “vision” have been quoted or paraphrased by virtually every succeeding writer on ley-lines (with the notable exception of Paul Screeton), including Janet and Colin Bord, John Wilcock and Stuart Holroyd: Francis Hitching has a hotch-potch of fact and fantasy in Earth Magic.
What are these essential elements?
All five elements are romantic and evocative – and wrong or debatable.
1. It was summer (June 30th) and in the 1920s (1921) and it was a hot year according to local records (and to Watkins). There is no evidence that it was hot on this particular day but it creates a mental image – and if it hadn’t been sunny, Watkins wouldn’t have been on horseback, would he?
2. But he wasn’t on horseback. He was, after all, 66 years old. Anyway, he travelled everywhere by car, being a motor freak. He’d owned steam and petrol cars and hadn’t used a horse since his early days as an “outrider” for the family firms.
3. He wasn’t at Bredwardine, or even on his way to Bredwardine, or on the Bredwardine Hills, or near Bredwardine. He was about to got to Blackwardine, which is ten miles to the north of Hereford, not 12 miles to the west. There are no Blackwardine Hills. Blackwardine has recently been the site of renewed excavation, incidentally, and Roman settlement there has been established; Watkins nay have been going there prior to a visit by the Woolhope Club that coming September. {107} 4. There being no hilltop at Blackwardine, Watkins couldn’t have put the brake on his car, much less pulled up his non-existent horse, to gaze at any view below. What he did do, either before setting out or before reaching Blackwardine, was to consult his map (Blackwardine is a small nondescript locality and many Herefordians today would be hard put to place it). He did, however, stop at hill-tops at some later stage, that day or later, and confirm line-of-sight alignments between hills.
5. There was no ‘vision’ at Blackwardine, in his car or later, of glowing wires, as far as we know. What Watkins did was look at his map, make a visual check from the hilltops on the supposed alignment, and then launch himself into fieldwork and mapwork before presenting his findings to the Woolhope Club three months later. Further, it wasn’t unique: Watkins was far from the first to note alignments, as IGR members must know. And as I suggested in a previous JOG, maybe Watkins was either suppressing or repressing work with which he should really have been acquainted , like W.H. Black’s paper read in Hereford when Watkins was a lad (but evidently interested in standing stones, as I’ll show) and remembered and quoted by Woolhope Club members long after. There was also F.J. Bennett’s 1904 paper (republished by Fenris Wolf – 40p) which was referred to in Johnson’s Byways in Archaeology, a book which Watkins knew and read. I also feel Watkins did owe much more than he admitted to the work of fellow Woolhope member James Wood, who, Watkins agreed, was pretty near the ley-line theory; Watkins was actually present at a club meeting when Wood’s notes on St. Weonard’s Tump were read in 1910, in which Wood not only mentioned “a line of such works (tumuli) across South Monmouthshire and West Gloucestershire” but goes on to say that “we find such roads were in many cases ‘ranged’ or laid out in line with small camps … such tumuli being, in fact, surveying stations”.
But Watkins himself claimed that his alignment theory was unique, so Michell can perhaps be excused for taking him at his word. Even so, Michell’s is a distorted and impossibly romantic version of Watkins’s discovery. How did he arrive at such a mish-mash?
There is no excuse for the mix-up between Bredwardine and Blackwardine, especially as the 50th anniversary of Watkins’s discovery was celebrated in 1971 with a picnic at Risbury Camp on Watkins’s first ley, a mile or so from Blackwardine; anyway, Watkins describes it all in Early British Trackways. The story of the horse comes, I suspect, from the knowledge that Watkins did originally do his travelling as a rep in a horse and gig when he was a young man and also from the title he then held – ‘outrider’; there is no evidence, though, that he ever sat in the saddle.
Michell seems to have confused the beginning and the end of EBT where, at the start, Watkins describes how he first noticed a possible alignment on the map as he was planning his route to Blackwardine, and, at the end, where he recalls “the day, just on half-a-century ago, when, as a lad on a trader’s route for my father’s brewery, I pulled up my horse to look at wonder at the Four Stones (near New Radnor), standing like sentinels in a field corner …”. That, incidentally, would have been in precisely the same year, 1871, that W.H. Black published his Hereford talk on alignments, given in that city the previous year.
Now the ‘flash’: here the information came not from Michell’s misreading or imagination but from Allen Watkins, Alfred’s son, with whom Michell had spoken. “The scales fell from his eyes … the new concept flashed into consciousness instantaneously …” Allen Watkins said. His father, he later wrote, told him that the whole thing came to him “in a flash”. There are, of course, flashes and flashes. We often say things come to us in a flash, but we don’t necessarily mean some sort of psychic vision. The flash of insight Alfred Watkins may have had and apparently confided in his son is perfectly credible; I dare say he saw the way to inventing the exposure meter (another of his achievements) in the same way. But dress it up and set it in a fictitious, colourful, romantic scene and that flash becomes something else.
Admittedly Watkins himself mentioned “a rush of revelations”, but he doesn’t seem to mean psychic visions. And, again, in EBT, he refers to the moment he got “the first clue”, when “once started, I found no halt in the sequence of new facts revealed by active research on the tracks”. That conflicts seriously, in my mind, {108} with any notion of an instantaneous vision and fits much better into the methodical figure which we know to be Alfred Watkins.
Briefly, I’d like to touch on another error made by Michell, another that has been repeated by those who have used View Over Atlantis as a primary source rather than Watkins’s own writings (including in this case Paul Screeton). It may seem trivial, but I mention it as a cautionary tale and one that Watkins himself would have appreciated – he always stressed that field work is essential to confirm suspicions. Michell makes much of a stone that Watkins is supposed to have found which appeared to be a kind of ley map, with cup marks as indicators; this stone, says Michell, is in Tillington churchyard. Now this threw me, as there doesn’t happen to be a church at Tillington. I went to the original Watkins reference (in the Woolhope Club Transactions, 1933) and found the stone was in fact found by a Dr. J.S. Clarke, who told Watkins about it, and that it was against a cottage in a grassy lane on the Tillington parish boundary. This inaccuracy by Michell is not very important, irrelevant to the significance of the stone, but it is slapdash and it’s passed into accepted fact to be regurgitated by writers who treat Michell as gospel rather then Watkins.
The work of Alfred Watkins is still very important, not just as an example of gifted geomantic research but for the many insights and suggestions contained within his books and articles. But it has to be seen for what it is: part original, part derivative, part acceptable, part debatable, but above all well-researched, thorough and sensible.
It is hardly surprising, for Watkins was a meticulous man, a JP, councillor, superb photographer and good businessman, a combination of attributes that doesn’t usually add up to any sort of crank. He may well have suspected that ley-lines were more than trackways and were somehow linked to something more psychic – but that suspicion in no way invades the reasoning of OST.
Without Watkins, it’s arguable that alignment theories would never have gained the credence they now have; it’s also possible that as Watkins was only one of several researchers someone else may well have got together an equally compelling corpus of evidence.
Without Michell, Watkins may never have been rediscovered and represented to the extent he has since 1967; but equally we might say that Michell, with his mystic interpretation symbolized by that fictitious horseback ride and vision on the Bredwardine Hills, offered false hopes. As we said at the outset, there is poetry in ley-lines; but let’s stick to the facts as well.