Further review of EBT

“EARLY BRITISH TRACKWAYS.”

This is a painstaking and very pleasantly-illustrated book or pamphlet on a fascinating subject, being an expansion of a lecture delivered last September before the Woolhope Natualists’ Field Club, Hereford, by Mr. Alfred Watkins, a Fellow and Medalist of the R.P.S.Royal Photographic Society It was published at the time in extenso by a local paper where I read it and was duly impressed. At the first glance it strikes one as a wonderfully original and carefully worked out theory, and under that first impression. I brought it before a kindred society, where we discussed it in detail. On careful consideration, however, it struck the company, including myself, as proving far too much. Mr. Watkins seems to maintain that the numerous lanes, roads, tracks, footpaths, cattle tracks and hypothetical, i.e., non-existent but assumed connecting, tracks were all laid out by primitive man, mainly of the neolithic period, that this man was a highly skilful road engineer and worked on elaborate sighting systems. Our author says: “Presume a primitive people, with few or no enclosures, wanting a few necessaries (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 is 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 foresights of his rifle in line with the target.” He maintains these sighting lines were from mountain or elevated ridge (or peak) to ridge, and that the points in between were often artificial, either of earth, stone, water or trees, which secured the general direction of the track. These connections he calls “leys,” and concedes as great a length as 50 or 60 miles in some cases, and he makes some queer puns in the word, showing that he is not competent to deal with place-names at any rate. Castles, wells, ponds, rivers, moats, churches—all are dragged in to prove the existence of these prehistoric leys, and we are told that if one takes the inch ordnance map, settles on a sighting point and swings a straight edge from it through four objects at least of the type mentioned, tump, pond, church, wayside cross, standing stones, etc., one is sure to find fragments or indications of old roads or footpaths on that ley! In such historically ancient haunts of man as Herefordshire and district, or our own county, it is highly probable, and in throwing a straight edge anywhere on a map of such country one would be likely to strike portions of road or footpath. A book by a great hunter and traveller in Africa, newly published, tells us of the prowess of the rhinoceros as a road maker, his strength and determination clearing straight roads through the forest, in marked contrast to the exasperating curliness and meandering character of man-made tracks. Neolithic man was not much higher in the scale of intelligence than the inhabitants of Central Africa nowadays. Britain was, generally speaking densely covered with woodland and scrub and marsh, and the chance of the plotting out of long tracks of many miles in extent, without considerable technical science, was indeed small. There are curving streets in modern London whose wobblings were first set out by some early man stepping aside to avoid a bit of specially wet going, or the curled up form of a snake, or the fallen trunk of a rotten tree! No one who has wandered on the uncultivated hills and moorland of our country, or through the dense forests of more primitive lands but knows how much easier it is to follow in the faint footsteps of a predecessor, human or animal, than to tread down a new track for oneself, and hence the original wanderer’s track becomes confirmed, broadened and stereotyped. Tracks were doubtless made by early man along conspicuous ground, the ridge or slope of the downs, the place where hard ground sloped down direct to the river or stream, the rocky rib with its sparse herbage penetrating the jungle, etc., etc., but that these early men were expert aligners I refuse to believe. The first scientific roadmakers in Britain were the Romans. Nevertheless the booklet is good to have, much may be learned by the way, and the views are, generally speaking, excellent, as one would expect.
W.H.W.