Alfred Watkins(1855–1935)

Alfred Watkins was born at the Imperial Hotel, Widemarsh Street, Hereford on 27 January 1855, son of Charles Watkins, a Hereford hotelier, brewer and miller of substantial commercial standing, and Anne Smith. The father ran the Imperial Hotel and a brewing-and-flour-milling business at Hereford that the Watkins family had built into the largest Hereford-based commercial enterprise of the 1850s and 1860s. The boy was schooled at the Cusop Dingle preparatory school outside Hereford and then briefly at a private school at Hampton Wick, was taken out of school at fourteen on his father's preference for practical apprenticeship, and entered the family brewery at the Imperial Hotel premises at fifteen on the standard pupillage of the brewing trade. He continued in the brewing-and-hotel business as a partner across the next forty-five years of his adult life.

The travelling brewery-representative role across Herefordshire, Shropshire, the Welsh Marches, Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire gave him the geographical access that became the basis of his second career. He travelled on a horse and trap across the western Welsh-borderland country from 1875 onwards on a roughly fortnightly circuit, calling on the public-house licensees and country-hotel managers of the market towns of the Welsh Marches, taking delivery orders for the Hereford brewery, and using the spare hours of the trip for the photography. He had taken up photography in 1872 at seventeen on a Christmas-present plate-camera, and across the brewery-representative years he was building, on the side of the day-job, the most extensive single photographic archive of late-Victorian Welsh-Marches landscape, antiquities, parish churches and market towns of any working photographer of the period. He took an estimated thirty thousand exposures across the period 1872 to 1935; about three thousand of the surviving plates are now at the Herefordshire Records Office at Hereford and at the Hereford City Museum.

The Watkins exposure meter was the technical breakthrough of the photographic side of his career. The wet-plate-and-then-dry-plate photographic technology of the 1880s and 1890s required the photographer to estimate the correct length of exposure from a combination of light conditions, lens aperture, plate sensitivity and subject reflectance, on a rule-of-thumb that an experienced practitioner could approximate but that beginners regularly got wrong by a factor of two or three. Watkins, who had been working out his own exposure-calculation system through the 1880s for his Marches landscape work, published in 1890 a clockwork-mechanism *Bee Meter* that combined a photoelectric measurement of light intensity with a rotating-dial-of-the-plate-sensitivity calculation and gave the operator an exposure-time reading on a dial. The Bee Meter was the first commercial photographic exposure meter; it was patented in 1891 and produced by his Hereford workshop at a rate of about three thousand units a year through the 1890s and 1900s. The Watkins Meter Company at Hereford ran on the patent and on the subsequent improved-design Bee and Standard meters across the next four decades and was, by 1930, the British photographic-instrument firm.

The ley-lines theory came at sixty-six in the summer of 1921. He had been riding across Bredwardine Hill in west Herefordshire on a horseback errand on 30 June 1921, stopped at the ridge of the hill to look at the country, took out his Ordnance Survey map of the western Welsh Marches, and noticed (by his own account in the 1925 *The Old Straight Track*) that a series of small prehistoric and early-medieval landscape features in the country in front of him (a Bronze-Age standing stone at the small village of Croft, an Iron-Age hillfort at the hill above Lyonshall, the parish church at Kington, a medieval moot-mound at the small hamlet beyond Kington, a Roman road bearing east-west across the Welsh borderland) lay along a single straight line on the map. He took the geometrical observation as the foundation of what he called the *ley* system: a pre-Christian system of straight tracks across the British landscape, marked at the period by the named landscape features and surviving in the modern map as the alignments of the dolmens, standing stones, hillforts, parish churches and Roman roads. He published the theory in 1925 in *The Old Straight Track*, which has been continuously in print since.

The ley-lines theory has had an unusual subsequent life. Modern archaeology rejects it on the methodological ground that the density of pre-modern landscape features across the British countryside is high enough that statistical alignment of any small set of them is a mathematical accident rather than a designed feature. The theory has, however, become one of the foundation texts of post-1960s British landscape mysticism, the New Age countercultural movement of the 1970s, and the contemporary popular-archaeology and earth-mysteries publishing market that runs from the *Whole Earth Catalog* tradition through to the Glastonbury-and-Stonehenge tourism of the modern period. Watkins himself was, by all surviving evidence, a Hereford Anglican of modest middle-class commercial standing who took the theory on the small-geometrical observation he had made on Bredwardine Hill and made no further claims for it beyond the landscape-archaeological one. He died at his Hereford house on 7 April 1935, eighty years old, of complications from chronic bronchitis. He is buried at Hereford Cathedral cemetery alongside his wife Marion Cross, whom he had married in 1888. The Watkins name in the Welsh-side catalogue is the patronymic of *ap Watcyn* (son of Watcyn, the Welsh form of Walter through the Norman name carried into the Welsh March in the twelfth century); he carried it from a Hereford brewer's family into the foundation text of British landscape mysticism and the first commercial photographic-exposure meter.