The Herefordshire Photographic Society, by prevailing on Mr Alfred Watkins, F.R.P.S., to re-deliver at the Town Hall on Tuesday, in an enlarged form, the lecture which in September last year he gave before the Woolhope Club on “Ancient British Trackways,” not only honoured itself, but provided the citizens of the city with a memorable evening of instruction and delight. The hall was well filled.
The MAYOR (Mr. M. C. Oatfield), who presided, lost no time over preliminaries, but invited Mr. Watkins to proceed without regard to platform conventionality. There were over 100 slides, reproduced photographs, many of great beauty, and maps as prepared by the lecturer himself. Mr. S. Beeson was at the lantern, the screen was unusually large, and, apart from the subject itself, the exhibition of scenery, quaint roads, glades, mountains, mounds, villages, moats, castles, crosses, and primitive causeways and fords was extremely fascinating.
As Mr. E. L. WALLIS said in a few words at the end of the lecture, it was a very great treat “to see those beautiful pictures and hear the lecturer’s beautiful ideas about this beautiful county of Hereford.’
With an interval of ten minutes, which Mr. Watkins mercifully granted himself as breathing time, the lecture occupied two hours.
Mr. WATKINS, at the outset, took his audience back to the neolithic age. He might roughly fix it at 4,000 years ago: 2,000 years before the Roman occupation of Britain. What he had to tell them concerning the method by which, in that remote period, this island home of ours, the germ of a mighty empire, was traversed, was not to be found in books, it was written on the face of the earth. The discovery of the system of long journeys by sighting had dawned upon him as a vision, the possibility of territorial tracking, so to speak, by a geometrical process of straight lines had flashed upon him with the suddenness of an inspiration. His task would be to try to indicate how he reached his conclusions, and, by means of pictures taken at first hand, to give them ocular proof and justify his deductions and surmises as to how it was done.
Etymology played no little part in the lecture, the origin of words, their derivatives and variants, and their fossilisation—the term is quite permissible—in our present clay nomenclature, throwing a wonderful light on the subject. It seemed to form a long chain which, link, by united us with the remote past.
In the suffix “ley”, for instance, with its many forms of spelling as “lea” and notably “leigh”—Huntley, Stoneleigh, and so on—they had a key and more than a key to the whole theory for “ley” was a sighting line or route indicator. But a line territorially is after all, in the first instance, hypothetical, hypothetical but none the less real, real as the bee-line or the straight course of the crow, for when the conjectural line of primitive man was followed continuously or even intermittently it became a track. To preserve that track or permanent route natural landmarks were adopted, or artificial landmarks were called into constant use. Such landmarks took the form of mounds, gigantic trees, ponds, stones, cairns, camps, castles, churches, mountain ridges, and mountain ridge cuttings. There then was the sighting system: thus were the ancient trackways formed.
Mr. Watkins amazed his audience by his very perfect topographical knowledge. There seemed to be no nook or corner, twist or turn, field or fell in this most picturesque of English counties but he had explored. The Irish peasant’s wonder concerning the carrying capacity of the one small head was constantly present in the minds of the audience. Mr. Watkins made his recital doubly interesting by the introduction of personal reminiscences, and anecdotes rendered more effective by colloquialisms racy of the soil. His pictures, as has already been said, were superb. The lecture, in a word, was a triumph, and at the close Mr. Watkins received full meed of applause.
Mr. G. H. JACK (County Surveyor,) in proposing a hearty vote of thanks to Mr. Watkins, said it was always a pleasure—indeed a privilege—to hear something original, especially original information from a fellow townsman. Mr. Watkins had started a theory entirely his own. To them it might be a simple thing to criticise the theories of other people. To start a theory of one’s own was not so easy. What struck one was the enormous amount of work which Mr. Watkins had put in; it was really inconceivable. The photographs as taken by Mr. Watkins himself were masterpieces of artistic composition and technique. They illustrated his subject in a wonderful manner. If they had not benefited in any other way, they had benefited by these pictures. Mr. Watkins had shown what could be done in a very short time in unravelling a subject of the greatest interest to this county, and to which there would, no doubt, be increased attention given. They thanked him very cordially (applause).
Alderman WALLIS, seconding, said they were all very proud of Mr. Watkins, who was an asset to the city of Hereford. They were each proud to rank themselves as one of his friends. They had had that evening a very great treat (applause).
The MAYOR said that before putting the resolution he could not deny himself the pleasure of paying a tribute to Mr. Watkins. He had had the pleasure of working with him in public matters in this city for nearly 40 years, and none could appreciate more than himself what he (Mr. Watkins) had done. When most of those now engaged in public life were dead and forgotten, Mr. Alfred Watkins’s name would live in Herefordshire as a great photographer, inventor, scientist, and archæologist. The light which they had had thrown to-night on the past had been a great inspiration. He hoped that it would inspire others to follow his example in study and research (applause).
Mr WATKINS admitted that it was true what Mr. Jack had said concerning the laboriousness of his task. It had been heavy work, but once commenced one had to continue it for very love. He world like again to repeat that the conclusions at which he had arrived as to sighting lines were not based on theory. They were deductions from facts following on what he might call natural revelation (applause).