Alfred Watkins

Why is Alfred Watkins so significant in the field of psychogeography?

A few years before his death, he introduced and developed the concept of "Ley" or "Lay" Lines, wrote some books on its practical application, and, in fact, personified the transition between an essentially documentary discipline (archaeo-topography) to an essentially perceptive/imaginative one (psychogeography), through an intermediate discipline of research and interpretation of ancestral signs and signals, which redefined the topography through ancient customs and beliefs.

Alfred Watkins, 1926

Alfred Watkins (Herefordshire, 1855-1935), began photographing in 1875, twenty years old. Before Watkins took up what would be his main business (antiquarian), he was known as a highly successful photography popularizer.

He invented and marketed photographic devices and even wrote the text "Photography: its principles and applications".

Watkins loved mechanics and technology: when he worked in the family brewery, instead of devoting himself to operate into the family business, he was passionate about grinding flour because there was great scope for modernization, such as, for example, the replacement of the millstones with steel rollers and the electrification of the system.

Watkins switched from local to national attention when he founded the "Herefordshire Photographic Society" in 1895 and was elected a member of the Royal Photographic Society in 1910 and that year he received the Medal of Progress for his research on photographic theory and practice.

Watkins first used the term Ley Lines on June 30, 1921.

While looking at a map and the land, he noticed a straight line passing over the hilltops through various points of interest, all ancient. Sites mentioned include Stone Circles, Standing Stones, Long Mounds, mounds, burial mounds and churches.

At the time of his discovery, Watkins had no alignment theory but he began to conceive a whole pattern of lines extending across the landscape. He noted and measure these sites to support his growing theory.

His first book entitled "Early British Trackways" was published in 1922 and it was the result of a lecture he had given the previous year. Four years later, in 1925, he described his vision in a book: "The Old Straight Track".

Watkins wrote other books on ley line theory; "The Ley Hunters Manual" (1927) and "Archaic Tracks Around Cambridge" (1932).

The interest in Watkins's works, but above all in the theories, was such that "The Straight Track Postal Portfolio Club" was formed which operated until the beginning of the Second World War.

"......I do not know, dear reader, whether you will be as much astonished in reading the new facts which I disclose, and the deductions I feel obliged to make, as I have been in the disclosure. Frankly, if another person told them to me, I should want to verify before acceptance. And I try to aid you to verify. But do note this—that the important point in this booklet is the previously undiscovered string of facts, which make it necessary to revise former conclusions. My deductions may be faulty. But the facts are physical ones, and anyone can test in their own district whether moats, mounds and churches do not line up in straight lines with a hill peak at one end, and with bits of old tracks and antiquarian objects on the line......"

(Watkins, Alfred, "To the average reader", from Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps, and Sites.)

THE LEY

".......Each ley or track was as separate and distinct from other legs as each animal or tree is an organism distinct from other animals or trees. As they crossed each other, no doubt users often transferred from one to the other at the crossing, and struck out in an altered direction, hence the place name element "turn." But the way thus travelled was a route, not a road. It is an absurdity to speak of a sighted road having branches, or bending. Each individual track was " a long lane that has no turning."......".

(Watkins, Alfred, Early British Trackways, Moats, Mounds, Camps, and Sites.)

The theory founded by Watkins in 1921 has had different interpretations and declinations, and its popularity reaches up to the present day, well after Watkins' death.

Some pages of the 1988 "The Ley Hunter" are published below.

More than sixty years later, in the articles of this publication, reference is still made to Watkins and the different interpretations and origins of his conclusions on alignments between signs, be they casual or deliberate to respect a belief, celebrate a ritual or send a message into the future.

A key factor unites what Watkins theorized in 1921 and what is now related to the concept of ley lines: research (or hunting).

It is done with the aim of tracing and bringing out signs of the past or instead relating particular conformations of the earth with ancestral mysteries and esoteric or even extraterrestrial interpretations.

In this bond that spans over a century, we go from the self-directed archaeo-topographical studies of an antiquarian and photography enthusiast from Herefordshire, passing through sects and beliefs, intersections with currents of thought and art that come from an even more distant past, up to the 1950s and following, when the re-interpretation of a space or land becomes an affirmation of political-artistic freedom against the establishment through the questioning of the urban topography.