ALIGNMENTS OF ANCIENT SITES IN ESSEX 67
such as Merk-stones, Mark's Ley, Stock, Cross Leys,
etc., lies along these lines." (The Old Straight Track,
p. 194.)
Apart from the convenient etceteras, if this correspondent
from Chelmsford really did write Mark's Ley for, pre-
sumably, Mark's Tey, then we see to what lengths
self-deception can be carried.
Watkins' opponents, when they deigned to speak at all,
contented themselves by saying that the theory was
archaeologically preposterous and by asking whether, after
all, it was not to be expected that one would find four or
five ancient sites more or less in a straight line in an area
of twenty or thirty miles square.
These controversial arguments and their appeal to
emotion seemed to me inconclusive; therefore I have recently
subjected the alleged facts to scrutiny of a kind which does
not seek to support or to disprove the archaeological con-
clusions, but only to investigate whether the alleged
alignments, or some of them at least, are likely to be
deliberate and purposeful, or whether they would arise by
chance among large numbers of sites distributed at random,
without human intention that the sites should be so aligned.
As I have chosen Essex as the field for my enquiry, I
believe you may be more interested in my conclusions : I
am well aware that this choice may seem not entirely fair
to a theory originally developed from sites in the West
Country, but we have Watkins' repeated assertion that he
had abundant confirmation from London and East Anglia,
as well as from other parts of England, so there is no real
injustice in my choice of Essex. I will first describe the
critical apparatus and then deal with the results.
There is a peculiar branch of mathematics dealing with
the laws of chance; as many of you know, it is possible to
calculate, for example, how often three "heads" should
turn up among four pennies tossed in a group. The mathe-
maticians are quite clear about this, and if they found that
a batch of Mint pennies gave consistently different results
from that predicted, they would have no hesitation in
ascribing the difference to conscious human intervention.