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.
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