Where Paths of History Cross (Pt.1)

When the commission charged with deciding which towns should be granted city status reported some years ago my home town was rejected on the basis that nothing had ever happened there. Apart from a bit of hurt pride the annoying things about this conclusion was its untruth. To say this about any place in these islands is shallow to an infuriating degree. It also misses the point about communities. Living peacefully and productively is apparently not enough to earn ‘citizenship’. Stick a pin into any map and start doing some research and I guarantee something, often significant, will have happened there or nearby.

This brings me back to the hillside. In the days of large local breweries they would send theirs sales reps ( outriders) out on horseback to take orders from their tenanted public houses. One such traveller was Mr Alfred Watkins who would ponder the landscape as he rode off to find a remote pub in the hills and he got to wondering how ancient people found their way round the dangerous forested land they inhabited. The product of this thinking was the ‘Old Straight Track’ (1925) and the notion of the ley line so beloved of the ‘new age’. The idea came to him while he rode over the hills near Bredwadine, no doubt eventually passing the track to the Church, where the reverend Francis Kilvert (of Kilvert’s Diaries) was once the vicar, and where Sir John Betjeman later visited on his researches of Herefordshire churches and Kilvert’s life.

Delve back into photographic history and you will find that the same man was the inventor of the Watkin’s Exposure Meter. His path probably passed our gate as he made his way to one of the many public houses which were then scattered among these hamlets of the Golden Valley. So get that pin out and I guarantee, if you have a copy of his book to hand, that you will spend hours looking for the ley lines in your area, which in turn will lead to ancient sites where churches now stand, to the watch towers of warring times, and the ancient route centres where, according to some, nothing has ever happened.

Dacier