Ley lines, then. Arguing about whether ley lines exist or not sometimes feels like arguing about climate change or religion. You are never going to change anyone's mind and it's all to easy to get mired in extreme positions. The setting in England was familiar but foreign, I’m sure for someone reading this and coming from or really knowing the areas mentioned (i.e. Herefordshire), it would be even more magical to read. Charlesworth, Michael (2010). "Photography, the Index, and the Nonexistent: Alfred Watkins' Discovery (or Invention) of the Notorious Ley-lines of British Archaeology". Visual Resources. 26 (2): 131–145. doi: 10.1080/01973761003750666. S2CID 194018024. Kitty Hauser, ‘Fertile Images’, in Melanie Keen and Eileen Daley eds., Necessary Journeys, London 2005, pp.34–7. The Malvern Hills in the United Kingdom, said by Alfred Watkins to have a ley line passing along their ridge

He was captain of the Hereford Rowing Club for many years and was a founder member of the Hereford Debating Society and of the Hereford Bee-Keepers Association. For the latter he helped provide a horse-drawn ‘bee van’ that trundled the country roads of Herefordshire providing examples of good management in bee keeping, illustrated as night descended, by slide shows. Carroll, Robert Todd (3 December 2015). "Ley Lines". The Skeptic's Dictionary . Retrieved 16 September 2019. Biographical introduction to Alfred Watkins' Herefordshire in his own words and photographs by Ron & Jennifer Shoesmith; Logaston Press; November 2012

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Aerial archaeology was valued precisely for its modern, moneyed glamour, carrying the subject away from the control of old men like Watkins, the very figure of the antiquarian. Crawford was in his thirties, Piggott early twenties, as were Piper and Nash. Crawford was financially supported in civilian archaeology by Alexander Keiller (also in his thirties) who enjoyed a substantial private income from the family marmalade business. Their jointly authored Wessex from the Air (1928) is much more conscious of the heritage of archaeology than anything in Watkins’s works. One photograph of the Stonehenge Avenue (fig.10) also reveals in the form of a large white spot, surrounded by a darker band, a round barrow opened by the eighteenth-century Wiltshire field antiquarian, Sir Richard Colt Hoare; it is as much about the archaeology of archaeology, and its role in regional identity, as about that of the landscape itself. 38 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]

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. Suddenly, the conservative miller from Hereford morphed into a countercultural visionary, a prophet of the Age of Aquarius. Mitchell’s Watkins was to be a key cultural influence in the arts in the 1970s. Many of Richard Long’s landscape works are clearly influenced by the ley line idea, as are the works of fellow landscape artist Hamish Fulton. Iain Sinclair’s early poetry, especially the 1975 book Lud Heat, explicitly centres on the notion of ley lines under the urban landscape of London, complete with maps. And Mitchell’s decision to place the tor at Glastonbury at the centre of his network, the capital of his sacred landscape, is still played out most summers on the Eavis family farm.Ruggles, Clive L. N. (2005). "Ley Lines". Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopaedia of Cosmologies and Myth. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO. pp.224–226. ISBN 978-1-85109-477-6. Hauser, Kitty (2008). Bloody Old Britain: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life. London: Granta. ISBN 978-1-84708-077-6. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi: 10.1093/ref:odnb/55540. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Well before Watkins took up antiquarian pursuits in his sixties he was famous as a highly successful populariser of photography, inventing and successfully marketing photographic aids and authoring a key text for amateur photographers Photography: Its Principles and Applications. Watkins took up photography in 1875, aged twenty. He developed his photographic practice alongside a career running the family’s brewery and flour-milling business in Hereford. Watkins focused on flour milling because it offered opportunities for modernising the industry (replacing mill stones with steel rollers, electrifying the plant) and widening his horizons, taking him not only throughout the region to meet farmers but to London markets too. Among the products of the The Imperial Flour Mills, as they were called,was a patent nutritious flour, so called Vagos (named after the Roman name for the river Wye flowing through the city), which sold nationally. Watkins was a liberal activist, campaigning for free trade against Tory tariff policies, largely on the virtues of cheap British staple food, and gave lantern-slide lectures around Herefordshire which attracted the newly enfranchised class of labouring men, some of whom recalled the hungry years of the nineteenth century, who helped create the liberal electoral landslide of 1909. 9

Adam Stout, Choosing a Past: The Politics of Prehistory in Pre-War Britain, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wales, Lampeter 2004, pp.191–3. In his 1961 book Skyways and Landmarks, Tony Wedd published his idea that Watkins' leys were both real and served as ancient markers to guide alien spacecraft that were visiting Earth. [21] He came to this conclusion after comparing Watkins' ideas with those of the French ufologist Aimé Michel, who argued for the existence of "orthotenies", lines along which alien spacecraft travelled. [22] Wedd suggested that either spacecraft were following the prehistoric landmarks for guidance or that both the leys and the spacecraft were following a "magnetic current" flowing across the Earth. [22]From the 1940s through to the 1960s, the archaeological establishment blossomed in Britain due to the formation of various university courses on the subject. This helped to professionalise the discipline, and meant that it was no longer an amateur-dominated field of research. [13] It was in the latter decade of this period that a belief in ley lines was taken up by members of the counterculture, [13] where—in the words of the archaeologist Matthew Johnson—they were attributed with "sacred significance or mystical power". [20] Ruggles noted that in this period, ley lines came to be conceived as "lines of power, the paths of some form of spiritual force or energy accessible to our ancient ancestors but now lost to narrow-minded twentieth-century scientific thought". [19] Alfred Watkins’s lifelong interest in photography started in his late ’teens with little more than a pinhole camera, developing his wet glass-plate negatives in a small tent before they had a chance to dry. This is fascinating. I didn’t even know that ley lines were a name coined by a single person, rather than having always been known. Mr. Watkins must have been a wonderful man to spend time with.