ALIGNMENTS OF ANCIENT SITES IN ESSEX 65
churches, red-hills, fords, ancient ponds, moated houses and
places with names like Toot-hill, Cold-harbour and many
other names quoted by him in his books. He also went so
far as to claim, not in jest but quite seriously, that "ley"
was the word-element in the line laid down and that if you
missed your track in 2000 B.C., you would have been
de-layed on your journey. It was probably this insistence on
frequently outrageous derivations, even in the face of estab-
lished philological knowledge, that deprived him of support
from professional archaeologists.
The majority of his critics poured scorn on the elaboration
of detail which Watkins had read into the already-accepted
fact of certain rectilinear site-alignments: the minority,
including some amateurs more enthusiastic than cautious,
hailed Watkins' book as the key to all antiquity and professed
to find alignments of sticks and stones, churches and dairies
until the whole of the West Country was covered with a mesh
of lines like gossamer on downland grass. It is but fair to
say that Watkins' followers, the "Old Straight Trackers",
have now largely forsaken the hypothesis that the alignments
represent trackways, but they have lent themselves to even
more elaborate hypotheses which find no place in this
discussion.
Watkins, to do him justice, is cautious throughout his
books, apart from his excursions into the dangerous land of
philology, where he seems to have ''eaten the insane root
which takes the reason prisoner". He was trained in the
ways of scientific thought, yet clearly he had a love for the
empirical, often based on sound judgment and enlivened by
genius (witness his factorial method of photographic, develop-
ment, still widely used today). His archaeological enquiry
was inspired by the Radnorshire and Herefordshire uplands :
his books are illustrated almost entirely by examples from
the Welsh marches, where tumuli and other pre-historic
sites abound, although he did not limit himself entirely to
that area.
I read his second book soon after it was published, and
tried out his methods in our own county of Essex. Also,
Mr. Donald Maxwell, who wrote so entertainingly of
"Unknown Essex", dealt with some alleged alignments in