Alfred Watkins(1855–1935)

Alfred Watkins was born at the Imperial Hotel, Hereford, on 27 January 1855, son of a Hereford hotelier, brewer and miller. He left school at fourteen, entered the family brewery at fifteen, and 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 his second career. From 1875 he travelled the western Welsh-borderland country by horse and trap on a fortnightly circuit, taking up photography in 1872 and building, on the side of the day-job, the most extensive single photographic archive of late-Victorian Welsh-Marches landscape, antiquities and market towns of any working photographer of the period. About three thousand of his surviving plates are now at the Herefordshire Records Office and the Hereford City Museum.

The Watkins exposure meter was the technical breakthrough. The plate photography of the 1880s and 1890s required the photographer to estimate exposure from light, aperture, plate sensitivity and reflectance by rule of thumb; Watkins worked out his own calculation system for his Marches landscape work and in 1890 produced the clockwork Bee Meter, which gave the operator an exposure reading on a dial. It was the first commercial photographic exposure meter, patented in 1891 and made at his Hereford workshop, and the Watkins Meter Company was, by 1930, the leading British photographic-instrument firm.

The ley-lines idea came at sixty-six. Riding across Bredwardine Hill in west Herefordshire on 30 June 1921, he stopped on the ridge, took out his Ordnance Survey map, and saw that a series of prehistoric and early-medieval landscape features, a standing stone, a hillfort, a parish church, a moot-mound, a Roman road, lay along a single straight line. He took it as the basis of what he called the ley system: ancient straight tracks across the British landscape, marked by those features and surviving in the modern map. He published it in 1925 in The Old Straight Track, continuously in print since.

The Old Straight Track became one of the foundation texts of twentieth-century British landscape writing and earth-mysteries publishing, a continuing influence from the New Age countercultural movement of the 1970s through to the Glastonbury-and-Stonehenge landscape tradition of the present day. He died at his Hereford house on 7 April 1935, eighty years old, and is buried at Hereford Cathedral cemetery. The Watkins name, the Welsh patronymic ap Watcyn, he carried from a Hereford brewer's family into both the first commercial photographic exposure meter and one of the most enduring popular ideas about the British landscape.