Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Watkins was active in the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom and served as its president when it was held in Hereford in 1907. In 1910 he was awarded the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS). [3] Instituted in 1878, the medal honours any invention, research, publication or other contribution resulting in an important advance in the scientific or technological development of photography or imaging in the widest sense. It also carries with it Honorary Fellowship of the society. [4] Over 3,000 photographs, taken from Alfred's original glass negative plates are held by Hereford Library.
Watkins referred to these lines as "leys" although had reservations about doing so. [11] The term ley derived from the Old English term for a cleared space, with Watkins adopting it for his lines because he found it to be part of the place-names of various settlements that were along the lines he traced. [12] He also observed the recurrence of "cole" and "dod" in English place-names, thus suggesting that the individuals who established these lines were referred to as a "coleman" or " dodman". [6] He proposed that the Long Man of Wilmington chalk geoglyph in Sussex was a depiction of such an individual with their measuring equipment. [7] Watkins believed that the Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex depicted a prehistoric " dodman" with his equipment for determining a ley line. Alfred Watkins, Photography, its Principles and Applications, London 1911, pp.v, 1, 17, 32, 321–5, 264–79. The highly successful Bee light meter was produced in Birmingham by R. Field, foremost manufacturers of range finders for surveyors and the military. 11
The air – playing down from the Forest – is like wine all over Radnor Bottom, and folk from the more relaxing plains of Herefordshire come for a brace-up to quarters such as ‘The Eagle’ or ‘King’s Arms’ at New Radnor…” 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. Alfred Watkins died at the age of 80 in April 1935. in his obituary in the Hereford Times the writer asked ‘who in the city can be unfamiliar with that slightly bent figure: intense, abrupt, hurrying to some business or engaged in animated conversation, oblivious to anything save the object in hand. He concluded that ‘First and foremost he was a Herefordshire Man, as native to the county as the hop and the apple’. Alfred Watkins became a member on 24 May 1888, Queen Victoria’s 69th birthday. From then on, he regularly attended the Club’s meetings, in Hereford during the winter months and out and about in the County and further afield in the summer. For many years the Club Transactions were illustrated almost entirely by Watkins’ photographs. Rare shots include buildings long since demolished, historic trees and diverse countryside activities. 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’.
This book, sadly, contains many archeological, historical, and philological points which are either now proven false or were completely surmised to begin with. Take as only one example the assumption, simply put, that because ley men carried staffs, and priests and other figures of power also carry staffs, they are therefore linked. The links to druids also fall flat, though more disappointingly due to the fact that Watkins, as so many still do, took Victorian fabrications as true. In many cases Watkins cannot be held entirely at fault, as he often relied on information gathered from sources which are now outdated or were incomplete, but he did however, as can be seen in examples throughout the book, fall into conjecture and what can only be described as confirmation bias. In photography, Watkins began with a primitive pinhole camera made from a cigar box. He devised an " exposure meter" after exploring the mathematical relations of light, lens size and exposure period. He published findings in the April 1890 edition of the British Journal of Photography and patented his exposure meter. The Watkins Meter Company was active for over 40 years and exported all over the world. The device contributed much to photography's emergence as a mass-market art form. His Watkins Manual of Exposure and Development (1900), ran to eleven editions. [5] The book itself was pretty awful in some senses but the concept and content; absolutely fascinating and mind-blowing.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: Simon Broadbent (1980), Simulating the Ley Hunter, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A (General), 143 (2), pp. 109-140, doi 10.2307/2981985, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2981985 Hutton, Ronald (2009). "Modern Druidry and Earth Mysteries". Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. 2 (3): 313–331. doi: 10.2752/175169609X12464529903137. S2CID 143506407. Crawford founded Antiquity in 1927as a new kind of publication between a learned journal and the popular press to publicise serious research and scholarship, with high production values, classy typography, accessible writing and high quality illustrations, especially aerial photography. Antiquity particularly appealed to a literary and artistic audience, inspiring modern-minded artists with a taste for the primordial Britain, notably John Piper and Paul Nash. 36 Daniels, Seymour and Watkins, 1997. Tim Barringer, ‘Music and Vision: Landscape, History and Empire in Elgar’s Caractacus’, paper given at AHRC framework seminar ‘Land, Air and Water’, University of Nottingham, 2 July 2006.
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 was a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, an authority on beekeeping and a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He was also involved in the preservation of Pembridge Market Hall in Herefordshire. Watkins’s influence on the visual arts was confined to the work of illustrator and devoted Churchman Donald Maxwell RA, author of A Painter in Palestine: Being an Impromptu Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1921), and converted to the ley-line system by Watkins’s field manual The Ley Hunter’s Companion. 33
Blog Archive
I was prompted to return to it by the appearance of some photographs by Alfred Watkins in the 2005 A Picture of Britainexhibition at Tate Britain and by current academic interests, in a number of disciplines, in visual representations of antiquity. 7
Great Deal 
New Comment