Alignment research has blown hot and cold on the fringe of archaeology since Sir Norman Lockyer published Stonehenge and Other British Stone Monuments Astronomically Considered in 1906. In it, Lockyer described some alignments in the vicinity of Stonehenge which had been drawn to his attention by the director general of the Ordnance Survey. Controversially, he included Salisbury Cathedral on one of his alignments because he thought it possible that the cathedral occupied an earlier site.
In 1912, Walter Johnson introduced this line of reasoning to a wider public in his popular Byways of British Archaeology, which demonstrated the continuity of religious tradition in Britain with instances of churches built on pagan sites, many of them within earthworks.
Alfred Watkins took this idea a step further in 1922 when he wrote Early British Trackways, and in 1925 when he wrote The Old Straight Track (ISBN 0 349 13704 8) and introduced the concept of leys.

Alfred Watkins

Watkins was a Herefordshire man, a gentleman amateur who had observed in his travels that many of the mounds, moats, beacon hills and fords of his native county fell into alignment with each other. Between these points he found castles, churches, mark stones and wayside crosses which he thought might also occupy prehistoric sites. Watkins surmised that these landmarks were all that remained of a system of tracks once used by prehistoric traders in salt, flint, and (later) metals, who had laid out their routes with staves and marked the way at intervals with stones. Many of these alignments passed through open woodland glades, and because of this Watkins called them leys, a name derived from an old Anglo-Saxon word meaning 'a forest clearing'. Though the original leys were now overgrown and invisible, Watkins maintained they could still be traced by careful mapwork and investigation in the field.

Archaeologists, of course, had several very valid objections to Watkins' theory. Firstly, there was the apparent uselessness of leys as trackways. What traveller would use a track that led him straight through forests, bogs and lakes? Then there was the question of dating. Could anyone be certain that alignments of medieval castles and churches followed prehistoric tracks? Finally, had Stone Age man been equal to the task of lining up sites across the landscape in an accurate manner? Without maps, surveying equipment, without even a pencil and paper? In the long run it was decided there was too much speculation in Watkin's work and not enough evidence. After Watkins died in 1935 his theory was ignored by the professionals and kept alive mainly by members of the Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club which lost momentum during the war and met for the last time in 1946.

On to The Watkins Country.

Back to the Home Page.