EARLY BRITISH TRACKWAYS, MOATS, MOUNDS, CAMPS, AND SITES. A Lecture given to the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club at Hereford by Alfred Watkins. 8¾×6¼, 41 pp. Hereford: The Watkins Meter Company. London: Simpkin Marshall. 4s. 6d. n.
Mr. Watkins has noticed that moats, mounds, and churches often “line up in straight lines with a hill peak at one end and with bits of old tracks and antiquarian objects on the line.” A primitive people, he concludes, laid out their tracks by sighting from peak to peak, with intermediate or secondary artificial sighting points in the form of barrows, stones, buildings, camps, &c.
Such a sighting line is a ley, and between the sighting points the primitive trackway ran straight. That a track runs from point to point, in a straight line if possible, may be conceded. That barrows, churches, and so forth line the track is true enough; Mr. Belloc, for instance, found such evidences in abundance on the Pilgrims’ Way. But Mr. Watkins seeks to prove too much: to him his theory is the clue to many a mystery, including the origin of place-names, formerly wrongly interpreted. Thus the suffix “-ley” does not mean a meadow, but a ley or sighting line; “-ton” is a mark-stone on the ley which becomes the nucleus of a homestead; “-bury” a mound which was a sighting tump, and so on.
Source info: Checked in library.