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Alfred Watkins
A Herefordshire businessman and inventor who proposed a testable archaeological theory in 1925, was wrong, and would probably have been appalled by what became of it.
Who they were
Alfred Watkins (1855–1935) was a Herefordshire brewer's representative, miller, pioneering photographer, inventor and amateur antiquarian, and the originator of the idea of leys — straight alignments of ancient sites across the British landscape.
He is included here partly because his theory did not survive, and partly because of what happened to it afterwards. Watkins is a useful case study in the difference between being wrong and being unserious.
Where they came from
He left school at sixteen and worked for his father's brewing and milling business, travelling Herefordshire by horse and later by car — which gave him an unusually detailed working knowledge of a single county's landscape, and is probably the whole origin of the idea.
He was a genuinely accomplished photographer. He invented the Watkins exposure meter and the Bee Meter, solving a real technical problem of the period, and was awarded the Royal Photographic Society's progress medal. He was an active member of the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club, published on local archaeology and beekeeping, and served as a magistrate.
The idea arrived, by his own account, on 30 June 1921, while he was riding near Blackwardine. Looking at the map, he saw — suddenly and all at once — a network of straight lines linking ancient sites across the county.
What they taught
The ley hypothesis. Watkins proposed that prehistoric Britain had been crossed by deliberately surveyed straight tracks, laid out for trade and navigation, and marked by features positioned to be visible from one to the next: mounds, standing stones, moats, ponds, notches cut into hilltop skylines, and later churches built on older sacred sites. He imagined a class of surveyors, whom he speculatively called dodmen.
He set it out in Early British Trackways (1922) and at length in The Old Straight Track (1925), and founded the Straight Track Club in 1926 to pursue it.
It was an entirely material theory. There is no energy in Watkins, no earth current, no sacred geometry, no lost universal science. He thought he had identified a practical transportation system built by practical people. He was a businessman proposing infrastructure.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the theory is wrong, and for reasons set out under ley lines: alignments of that kind occur in abundance by chance in any dense scatter of points, and his method allowed markers from wildly different periods to complete a single line.
We can say he did it properly by the standards available to him. He published a specific, falsifiable claim, described his method, and invited others to test it in their own counties. That is more than can be said for most of what followed him.
We can say he anticipated part of the objection himself. Watkins was aware that chance alignments were possible and attempted to argue that the number he found exceeded what chance would produce. He lacked the statistical tools to settle it, and the answer, when the tools arrived, went against him.
We can say the thing that matters most about him: the mysticism is not his. Everything now attached to ley lines — earth energies, dragon currents, dowsable grids, planetary consciousness — was added in 1969 by John Michell, thirty-four years after Watkins died. His name is permanently attached to a body of belief he never held and gave no support to. Anyone citing Watkins as an authority on earth energies is citing a man who wrote about trade routes.
We cannot say how he would have reacted, though The Old Straight Track offers a hint: it is dry, careful, full of measurements and photographs, and conspicuously free of wonder about anything except the practical ingenuity of prehistoric people.
His real legacy is probably not the leys at all. It is that a great many people started walking the landscape and looking at it closely, which is a decent thing to have caused.
Further reading
- The Old Straight Track (1925) — in print, cheap, and nothing like its reputation.
- Tom Williamson and Liz Bellamy, Ley Lines in Question (1983) — the careful archaeological assessment, fair to Watkins throughout.