Mr. Watkins has produced a work intended to shake all our existing ideas with regard to the origin and development of the roads of Great Britain. The work itself is an elaboration, with profuse illustrations and maps, of a lecture given last September before the well-known Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club, of which Mr. Watkins was President in 1919. He is also a Fellow and Progress Medallist (1910) of the Royal Photographic Society. It is a fascinating and interesting story that Mr. Watkins has to tell us, and it is that all our present knowledge on our roads has been fallacious, and he asks us, “first to clear the mind of present ideas of roads from town to town or with enclosed hedges; also of any assumption that orderly road-planning was introduced by the Romans.” And he asks his readers, in place of their present ideas, to presume “a primitive people, with few or no enclosures, wanting a few necessities (as salt, flint flakes, and, later on, metals) only to be had from a distance. The shortest way to such a distant point was a straight line, the human way of attaining a straight line was by sighting, and accordingly all these early trackways were straight, and laid out in much the same way that a marksman gets the back and fore sights of his rifle in line with the target.”
The main conclusion arrived at from the mass of evidence he has accumulated and his own observations is that, “during a long period, the limits of which remain to be discovered, but apparently from the Neolithic (later flint) age on past the Roman occupation into a period of decay, all trackways were in straight lines marked out by experts on a sighting system. Such sighting lines were (in earlier examples) from natural mountain peak to mountain peak, usually not less than 1,000 feet in hilly districts, probably lower heights in flat districts, such points being terminals. Such a sighting line (or ley) would be useless unless some further marking points on the lower ground between were made. Therefore secondary sighting points were made, easily to be seen by the ordinary user standing at the preceding sighting point, all being planned on one straight line. These secondary, and artificial, sighting points still remain in many cases, either as originally made or modified to other uses, and a large number are marked on maps.”
The large amount of evidence and illustration (there are no fewer than twenty full page plates, several with as many as three distinct pictures) given in support of the conclusions arrived at is most interesting, and should be especially so to surveyors.
* “Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps, and Sites.” By Alfred Watkins, Hereford. The Watkins Meter Co. No price given.
Source info: Cuttings agency.