Sir,—I would gladly take Mr. Alfred Watkins as seriously as he takes himself, for local investigation and
enthusiasm are valuable to archæology and all too uncommon. But of the alternative verdicts which he himself
propounds on his “big discovery” (see the cover of his book), namely, “truth or a mare’s
nest,” I am reluctantly impelled to the latter. Philology is not quite so tentative a science as he supposes. It
is just as certain that “ley,” alone or as a suffix, meant pasture, primarily and always, as that
“ton” meant a settlement, and neither a mark-stone, as he suggests, nor a ton by weight. I fear that
“absurd” is the mildest word applicable to his own etymologies. The common name “knap” of
eminences indicates to him the spot where flint knappers purveyed their wares. The word is, of course, simply the
Anglo-Saxon “cnæp,” middle English “knap,” a hill-top. And we can only keep silence even
from good words when he assigns the elements “white” and “red” in place-names to the tracks of
the salt man and the pottery man, and explains the prefixes “brom” and “broom” by the supposed
passage of witches on broomsticks (p. 31)! And in all this he makes his pre-Roman folk speak good Anglo-Saxon! That
there were trackways of some sort wherever there were men in the earliest times needs no demonstration. But Mr.
Watkins’s large system of scientific alignments is an attribution to semi-savages of powers they cannot have
possessed. It is agreed by the best students of these matters that the first trackways ran perforce along the ridges,
since the lower ground was impassable forest and marsh. Mr. Watkins brings his primitive roads freely into and across
this lower ground, and joins them up with streets that did not exist until thousands of years afterwards, as in Hereford
itself. Ponds were sighting points, because some of them lie on his hypothetical alignments and have paved bottoms. So
that our neolithic ancestors either waited until they were dry or walked through the water!—Yours, &c.
F. S. A.
Source info: Journal named in cutting; MS note by AW “WM Mar 31st”.