THE work by Mr. Alfred Watkins on early British trackways was recently reviewed in this journal, but as a good deal of attention seems to have been aroused by his theory a few more words may be said about it. His idea is that the old British trackways were planned on straight lines between conspicuous points, from which further points, in continuation of the line, could be successively sighted as guides for the road: and this might well have been so, as we know that the pack tracks of mediæval times always disregarded gradients and took the most direct line across country. Many of our existing roads still follow the course of these packmen’s paths, and there is every probability that those paths had been in use ever since the time of the ancient Britons. We cannot, however, agree that such things as tolmens, barrows, camps, and earthworks were ever constructed merely as sighting-points; for the objects of such antiquities are well established, and certainly had nothing to do with road-making. The Britons obviously chose high ground for their earthworks for defensive reasons, and usually built a chain of such “camps,” or forts, at intervals along ridges, these forts often being in a straight line simply because the ridge happened to be a straight one. The forts would be connected by tracks, naturally as direct as possible, so the discovery of a straight road between them would be no evidence whatever that they had been designed or used as sighting-points. Still, it is more than likely that a good many objects described as sighting-points by Mr. Watkins were actually constructed for that purpose, and it will be interesting to test his theory in different parts of the country. Dartmoor, which possesses so many stone avenues and processional ways, might greatly help to a solution, for it is still uncertain whether those ways were sighted upon some distant landmark or were laid out in connection with solar or planetary phases.
Source info: Cuttings agency.