By Alfred Watkins. The Watkins Meter Co., Hereford. 4s. 6d. net.
This is an exceedingly important little book for all endowed with the historical sense, and will worthily stand beside
Mr. Hippisley Cox’s “Green Roads of England” as a study of the road system of pre-Roman England. Mr.
Watkins’ special discoveries deal with the sighting system, whereby in prehistoric times trackways were laid out
in straight lines. The system was to create a succession of
“sighting-points”—mounds, or stones, or ponds—from which the next point could be seen. All the
points were in a straight line. Trees were sometimes planted on them, and high hills were often used as terminal points.
Mr. Watkins has traced out great numbers of such trackways in the Hereford district, and his book is enriched with large
numbers of extremely clear photographs to illustrate the points made in the text. These trackways,
he he declares, grew
in time so thick on the ground as to vie in number with present-day roads and by-ways. These trackways were the skeleton
framework upon which
the subsequent life of England was to be based. All forms of sighting points, be they mounds or stones or trees, became
objects of interest and places of meeting, and so were utilised on the introduction of Christianity. “Practically
all ancient churches are on the site of these sighting points, ususually at a cross of tracks, and there is evidence
that in some cases the churchyard cross is on the exact spot of the ancient sighting or marking stone.” Such, in a
few inadequate words, is the theory which is demonstrated with abundance of detail in a work for which
archæologists all over England will feel deeply
grateful. (But Mr. Watkins is surely wrong in deriving the world “delay” from being de-leyed or thrown off
the sighting-line or ley. It is the old French delai from the Latin dilatio, according to Prof. Skeat.)
J.D.W.
Source info: MS note by AW “Oxford Chronicle July 7th”.