The Old Straight Track: Its Mounds, Beacons, Moats, Sites and Mark Stones

Product Information

A study by David George Kendall used the techniques of shape analysis to examine the triangles formed by standing stones to deduce if these were often arranged in straight lines. The shape of a triangle can be represented as a point on the sphere, and the distribution of all shapes can be thought of as a distribution over the sphere. The sample distribution from the standing stones was compared with the theoretical distribution to show that the occurrence of straight lines was no more than average. [54] Alfred Watkins - A Herefordshire Man by Ron Shoesmith was published by Logaston Press in 1990 and gives a full account of his life and his publications.

The review in The Church Times was the longest and most approving. The book might appeal to antiquarian vicars pleased to locate their churches in an ancient rural landscape, and Watkins had devoted a whole chapter to alignment thinking in the Old and New Testaments; in its emphasis on public access to enchanted landscape, the review bears the imprimatur of the paper’s first lay editor, the socialist Anglo-Catholic Sidney Dark. 32 Watkins referred to these lines as "leys" although had reservations about doing so. [11] The term ley derived from the Old English term for a cleared space, with Watkins adopting it for his lines because he found it to be part of the place-names of various settlements that were along the lines he traced. [12] He also observed the recurrence of "cole" and "dod" in English place-names, thus suggesting that the individuals who established these lines were referred to as a "coleman" or " dodman". [6] He proposed that the Long Man of Wilmington chalk geoglyph in Sussex was a depiction of such an individual with their measuring equipment. [7] Watkins believed that the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex depicted a prehistoric " dodman" with his equipment for determining a ley line. Aerial archaeology was valued precisely for its modern, moneyed glamour, carrying the subject away from the control of old men like Watkins, the very figure of the antiquarian. Crawford was in his thirties, Piggott early twenties, as were Piper and Nash. Crawford was financially supported in civilian archaeology by Alexander Keiller (also in his thirties) who enjoyed a substantial private income from the family marmalade business. Their jointly authored Wessex from the Air (1928) is much more conscious of the heritage of archaeology than anything in Watkins’s works. One photograph of the Stonehenge Avenue (fig.10) also reveals in the form of a large white spot, surrounded by a darker band, a round barrow opened by the eighteenth-century Wiltshire field antiquarian, Sir Richard Colt Hoare; it is as much about the archaeology of archaeology, and its role in regional identity, as about that of the landscape itself. 38In photography, as with food, Watkins went from local to national attention. He founded the Herefordshire Photographic Society in 1895, one of many such local societies. Elected a member of the Royal Photographic Society, he became a fellow in 1910 and that year was awarded their Progress Medal for his researches into photographic theory and practice, a number of which were published by its journal. Simon Broadbent (1980), Simulating the Ley Hunter, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), 143 (2), pp. 109-140, doi 10.2307/2981985, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2981985 Hutton, Ronald (2013). Pagan Britain. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-197716.

Decimal currency was proposed as early as 1919, when Watkins, then supported by no less a figure than George Bernard Shaw, produced a booklet called Must We Trade in Tenths? This booklet, selling for 3d., proposed an octaval currency based on the old half-crown. Watkins' work resurfaced in popularised form from the 1960s following the publication of John Michell's book The View over Atlantis in 1969. Michell merged Watkins' ideas with mystical concepts not present in Watkins' own work. [8] In 2004, John Bruno Hare of the Internet Sacred Texts Archive (ISTA) wrote: Alfred Watkins, ‘A Summer Among the Dovecotes’, English Illustrated Magazine,1892, pp. 45–53. On Gere and New see Simon Houfe, The Dictionary of British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists 1800–1914, London, 1978, pp.315, 399. Alfred Watkins was the first researcher to really understand the significance of what we now call 'ley lines' in this country. Through what must have been hundreds of hours of research, he collected tonnes of information and put it all together for this lucid and engaging work that seeks to explain and explore the subject in undeniable depth. About the ‘cole’ names and their variants, which are far too ancient and widespread to derive from any coal-mining activities, Watkins gives archaic definitions of ‘coel’ which referred to omens and divination, and cites the old term ‘cole-prophet’ to describe a wizard or sorcerer. Following this train of thought, he suggests a long-lost practice that has left our landscape littered with names like Coleshill, Colebatch, Colebrook and many ‘cold’ variants like Cold Ash, Coldborough and Cold Harbour. He says:

Versions

Charlesworth, Michael (2010). "Photography, the Index, and the Nonexistent: Alfred Watkins' Discovery (or Invention) of the Notorious Ley-lines of British Archaeology". Visual Resources. 26 (2): 131–145. doi: 10.1080/01973761003750666. S2CID 194018024. September with Justin Townes Earle and Date Palms. I'd love to say hey and play some songs for you. I can get