Journeys in literatureScience and nature books

The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins – walking through the past

This eccentric but rigorous study of lost routes across England draws on archaeology and etymology, but is shot through with a compelling poetry

Most journeys are planned in advance and start out with a clear goal. This one started quietly when, on 30 June 1920, a respected businessman and photographer was visiting the Herefordshire village of Blackwardine, the site of a Roman settlement with the distinctly Celtic name of Black Caer Dun. He noticed that a straight line on the map he was carrying passed through a number of local landmarks: a croft, a hilltop, the site of a Roman camp, a straight stretch of lane. Taking his map to the top of the hill, he observed that other similar alignments lay all around him.

The man was Alfred Watkins, and the observation led initially to a lecture he delivered to the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club in Hereford the following September, on the subject of what he had come to call ley lines, a network of straight alignments taking in cairns, standing stones (many of which had been converted to village crosses), mounds, camps, castles, ancient church sites, prominent stands of trees, hilltops and other high places. The paper, in turn, led in 1925 to the publication of The Old Straight Track, Watkins’ record of a painstaking journey, or set of journeys, over the south of England in search of leys, always seeking the straight way but all too often forced to meander by the realities of geography.

I discovered The Old Straight Track in the mid-1970s, the era of the Stonehenge free festivals and a time when Watkins’ ley lines were the height of countercultural fashion. Being of a decidedly non-mystical cast of mind, I found myself drawn to the book’s practical and methodical direction. For me at least, the great thing about it is Watkins’ determination to really look at the landscape he covers and to try to make sense of what he sees. In this it strikes me as being as near to the method of poetry as any work of local history could possibly be.

In his 1921 lecture, Watkins was at great pains to point out that he had no initial theory to explain his discovery; the book is as much a record of an intellectual as a physical journey, as he works out just such a theory at considerable length. Along the way, he calls on archaeology, local history, cartography, botany and etymology, especially the origins of place names along his leys. Of course, Watkins belonged to the twilight of the generalist, those great Victorian and Edwardian researchers who felt no need to stick to narrow specialisms, but let their minds wander over wide bodies of knowledge, confident that all that could be known on a particular topic was readily available to them.

Some of his derivations were fanciful, to say the least. In the lecture, delay becomes de-ley, meaning to be diverted from the straight path, and he finds himself explaining away places where a line clips the edge of a mound rather than running through its centre. But overall he builds a clear, logical and internally consistent case.

And what was the theory that emerged from these purposeful wanderings? Being a practical man of the world, Watkins decided that these alignments represented ancient thoroughfares, routes along which goods such as salt, and craftsmen like flint knappers, traversed the countryside. He does speculate that the ley-men, surveyors using twin poles to lay out their routes across the landscape, were seen as seers of some sort because of their near-magical powers (he imagined the famous chalk Long Man of Wilmington to be an image of a ley-man) and that superstitions built up around way markers as the paths themselves fell into decline. But at heart, this practical man of means insisted that ley lines were a crucial element of pre-Roman British trade, tentative first steps on the journey to the mercantile empire in which Watkins grew up.

Although he created a network of ley hunters, the Straight Track Club, to expand on his work, Watkins was never able to convince professional archaeologists of the merits of his system; there are just too many approximations that have to be made to get monuments to fit in for the ley theory to be entirely convincing. Watkins died in 1935, and a decade or so later the club disbanded; the journey along the old straight track seemed to have petered out and Watkins’ work was just another dead end in the story of the relationship between the geography and history of Britain, to be filed away with the British Israelites and hunters after King Arthur’s cave.

However, as most authors know, books can take on a life of their own and the arc of their journeys can shift in unpredictable ways. The Old Straight Track got a somewhat unexpected kickstart in 1969 with the appearance of hippy guru John Mitchell’s seminal The View Over Atlantis. Mitchell converted Watkins’ ley lines into a sort of mystical national grid, lines of so-called earth energy linking the great religious sites of prehistoric Britain.

Suddenly, the conservative miller from Hereford morphed into a countercultural visionary, a prophet of the Age of Aquarius. Mitchell’s Watkins was to be a key cultural influence in the arts in the 1970s. Many of Richard Long’s landscape works are clearly influenced by the ley line idea, as are the works of fellow landscape artist Hamish Fulton. Iain Sinclair’s early poetry, especially the 1975 book Lud Heat, explicitly centres on the notion of ley lines under the urban landscape of London, complete with maps. And Mitchell’s decision to place the tor at Glastonbury at the centre of his network, the capital of his sacred landscape, is still played out most summers on the Eavis family farm.

You have to think that if Watkins were to come back today, he would be horrified by what has happened to his vision of a system of trade routes. Nevertheless, the story of his book is a salutary one, reminding us that the best journeys never go to plan and that the most interesting destinations are provisional. Physically, Hereford to Glastonbury is an easy drive, but here it represents a cultural journey of almost immeasurable distance and immense fascination. It’s tempting to think that Watkins had some sense of the potential distance his book might travel when he closed it with these words, words that resonate even with an outsider like me: “From our soil we wrench a new knowledge of old, old human skills and effort, that came to the making of this England of ours.” And this, of course, is a journey that never ends.

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