The highly successful Bee light meter was produced in Birmingham by R. Field, foremost manufacturers of range finders for surveyors and the military. 11 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: Regal, Brian (2009). "Ley Lines". Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. p.103. ISBN 978-0313355080. Marcus, Clare Cooper (1987). "Alternative Landscapes: Ley-Lines, Feng-Shui and the Gaia Hypothesis". Landscape. 29 (3): 1–10.

Williamson, Tom; Bellamy, Liz (1983). Ley Lines in Question. Tadworth: World's Work. ISBN 978-0-43719-205-9. Watkins joined the Woolhope Naturalists‘ Field Club, Herefordshire’s natural history and archaeology society, in 1888 and became its dominant figure, eventually president in 1918, through his provision, for free, of almost all the photography for the Club’s Transactions, making it the most advanced illustrated publication of any such local society and superseding that of many national, more academic ones. While concerned to record aspects of the past, especially those connected with popular ways of life, Watkins also focused on new developments, such as street clearances in Hereford to make it a brighter, more open city, and, on a special train excursion, the construction of the Elan Reservoir in mid-Wales, built to supply Birmingham with water. There were limits to Watkins’s power, notably his unsuccessful campaign to have women admitted to the Woolhope Club (as they were to the Hereford Photographic Society). 16 Progress medal, Royal Photographic Society, archived from the original on 22 August 2012 , retrieved 2 August 2011 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. David Dimbleby, with essays by David Blayney Brown, Richard Humphreys, Christine Riding, A Picture of Britain, London 2005. On representations of the past see Brian Leigh Molyneaux ed., The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology, London 2000; Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser eds., Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, Oxford 2005 (an abbreviated version of a chapter in this book is available online in Tate Papers, Sam Smiles, ‘Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire: Two Episodes in the Artistic Approach to British Antiquity’.How early it was that the beginnings of the ley system came must be a surmise but if it came as soon as man began to import flint or flint implements, it could not well be less than 25,000 B.C., that is, long before the Neolithic period commenced in Britain.” Well, this certainly corrected my completely inaccurate knowledge that humans had only been around for a couple thousand years!! Kendall, David G. (May 1989). "A Survey of the Statistical Theory of Shape". Statistical Science. 4 (2): 87–99. doi: 10.1214/ss/1177012582. JSTOR 2245331. From one perspective, the tale of ley-hunting is one of a classic modern religious movement, arising with an apocalyptic language which appropriated some of the tropes of evangelical Christianity, flourished for a brief time, and then subsided into a set of motifs and assumptions retained by a particular subculture of believers. From another, it is a frustrating tale of missed opportunities. The neglect of landscape and sensory experience by mainstream archaeology in the mid twentieth century was indeed a serious omission, which earth mysteries researchers could well have remedied to the lasting benefit of knowledge [...] Misled by a fixed and dogmatic set of ideas, however, they passed this by to focus on an attempted proof of beliefs which were ultimately based on faith alone. 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: But let’s not dwell on them! Watkins might have been a little hazy about time periods, as modern archaeologists have pointed out, but he was writing long before the advent of radiocarbon dating. In his descriptions, it’s easy to hear the voice of a man so in tune with the countryside, so observant and appreciative of the heritage that he was exploring.

This paper will explore the way the ley-line idea is shaped by Watkins’s photographic theory and practice, a popularising one which was part of a broader survey movement in topographical representation which emphasised access to landscape and its history for an educated public. 8 This paper is part of a longstanding academic interest in visual culture and topographical traditions in Britain. The subject first arose in two exhibitions curated with Nottingham colleagues some years ago on art and mapping and on landscape aesthetics in Herefordshire. 6 Devereux, Paul. "The Ley Story". The New Ley Hunter's Guide. Archived from the original on 9 August 2007. Ron Shoesmith, Alfred Watkins, A Herefordshire Man, Little Logaston Woonton Almeley, Herefordshire 1990.

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And what was the theory that emerged from these purposeful wanderings? Being a practical man of the world, Watkins decided that these alignments represented ancient thoroughfares, routes along which goods such as salt, and craftsmen like flint knappers, traversed the countryside. He does speculate that the ley-men, surveyors using twin poles to lay out their routes across the landscape, were seen as seers of some sort because of their near-magical powers (he imagined the famous chalk Long Man of Wilmington to be an image of a ley-man) and that superstitions built up around way markers as the paths themselves fell into decline. But at heart, this practical man of means insisted that ley lines were a crucial element of pre-Roman British trade, tentative first steps on the journey to the mercantile empire in which Watkins grew up. In politics, Alfred Watkins was a traditional Liberal, against the intrusion of party politics in local elections and strongly in favour Free Trade and of Votes for Women. He became a County Magistrate in 1907 and served on the Bench for many years. In 1914 he became County Councillor for Tupsley and was eventually made a County Alderman. His efforts were responsible for the riverside path below the old General Hospital and, as committee chairman, the design of the War Memorial in St. Peter’s Square. I realise that ley lines might be verging too far into the ‘hippy dippy’ side of history for some people, and in that case this book probably isn’t for you. But if you are willing to entertain an idea that might have more than a grain of truth in it, I can only recommend that you buy yourself a copy, and allow yourself the time to read and enjoy it. And if you’ve already read it, you will know for sure what I’m talking about, and I’m willing to bet it’s one of your most treasured books. On photographic survey see Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Commemorating a National Past: The National Photographic Record Association, 1897–1910’, Journal of Victorian Culture vol.10, no.1, 2005, pp.123–31. On survey and educated access more generally see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness, London 1998.