Comments on Walking Ancient Landscapes (British History)

[Chad]

Just finished chapter one... brilliant... made me want to get out of my armchair, don flat cap and hob-nail boots and head off for deepest, darkest Dorset.

No need for the video. It's so well written, I could have been walking with you.

[Chad]

Just finished reading the section on the Michael Line... in fact I read it a couple of times, because it is key to the entire theory.

If the uninitiated reader understands and buys into this part, you have him/her hook, line and sinker... if not, the book is in danger of getting tossed.

I personally, think you will hook far more than will sniff then swim away.

At this point you can start to ramp up the unorthodox stuff with little fear of them wriggling free.

BTW where are all the other readers' comments?

[Mick Harper]

They think it's holiday reading.

[Ishmael]

For some reason*, some of my comments ended up in another thread.


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*that could not possibly involve my doing anything wrong

[Rocky]

OK. I finished reading the first chapter. I like it. Sorry if I'm jumping the gun, but here are my ideas.

The first chapter seems to imply that if you need to get a load of ore from Cardiff to Leeds (or wherever), then it would be someone's job to do the entire journey. But maybe it wasn't done like that.

Suppose you have to get a load from point from B to H, with points C, E, and F in between, so that you have to go B, C, E, F, H. You don't go to D and G because they're not really on the way.

But wouldn't it be easier to have one person, say Bob, make the journey from B to C, and Fred from C to E, and so on, with Joe delivering from F to H. Each person would know their immediate destination, and the final destination of the load. Bob would only have to know the way from B to C, and that the load needs to get to H.

It's easier to teach people a smaller task than a big task, like how it's easier to teach someone to put the axle on a car, than build the entire car.

Of course, this leads to two questions. 1) How does Bob get paid when he doesn't interact with the final buyer at H? and 2) How does Fred know that to get the load to H he needs to go to E?

There would need to be a fair amount of organization. I was wondering if maybe there was a Megalithia Distribution Network Inc (MDNI) that built and managed the network. So that Bob wasn't paid directly by the buyer, but by MDNI .

Other people would be employed by MDNI. When Bob gets to C, there would be someone there to tell Fred that he needs to go to E. This person would be employed by MDNI and know all the routes, just like a ticket seller at a train station knows all the train routes. I'll call him the 'routeminder'. I don't think he'd need to be literate. The Odyssey was originally an oral work, and it takes 14 hours to recite. So if people were able to go around reciting the Odyssey from memory, then a routeminder could memorize some road routes.

Anyway, the routeminder would be hired and paid by MDNI as well. Maybe the routeminders were old guys who were too feeble for physical labour.

And when MDNI noticed that people were always getting lost on certain stretches of the way, then they would build a dwelling and pay a routeminder to live there.

Are these ideas anachronistic?

[Rocky]

And one other thing about the people who travelled the semi-itinerant routes between B and C, C and E, etc. Maybe it became a way of life and Bob decided that his family and friends would come too. Even today there are wives of truckers who travel around with their husbands in the truck so they can be together. If these families were paid by MDNI in ore, then maybe they would turn the ore into value-added products like pots or whatever, and they would make extra money from selling those.

Of course, the problem with this is that when MDNI became obsolete, why didn't these families adapt and go do something else?

[Mick Harper]

Rocky, your proposal is essentially the orthodox solution (insofar as they have ever thought about it). It is something that Dan and me ventured on in a discussion about organic versus strategic roads. Orthodoxy always goes for short-exchange systems (potlach being the soppiest and the most cited) because long-exchange pre-supposes the kind of high level organisation that they are systematically denying.

A part of Chapter One that got excised from the final version was a passage about Freedom Passes, which give you the right to use local buses free anywhere in the country. Wiseacres predicted that hordes of folk would be wandering the land now that travel was free but wiseracres pointed out correctly that once you get beyond (about) two buses the problems of co-ordination, and just knowing, make the journey a nightmare. To visit my mum in Dorset would take all day on the internet and all day on the buses. Much better to pay and take one bus all the way.

The chief problem with short-exchange is not so much organisation (though that is formidable indeed) as cost. Droving sheep is not going to make any sense if you have to pay mark-ups every few miles -- and it is the costs of exchange that beggar you, remember that every link in the chain has to find it worth his while, all the time, every time. What's left at the end...the lamb's tale? Looking at the problem over several thousand years, if anybody comes up with "the one bus" they would finish off all the short ones (and make sheep economic) so it is not surprising that people did come up with a through-service right after the introduction of agriculture (and sheepkeeping).

[Mick Harper]

[Rocky]

[Mick Harper]

In order to 'explain' how expensive grave goods got traded over vast distances in North America before Columbus, it was argued that the Red Indians gave each other these goods at 'potlaches' and hence everything got circulated. As the theory took on wings it was generally assumed that potlaches ceased to be mere gift-giving ceremonies and took on the role of de facto markets ie each chief figured what he was owed from last year and shifted on the same this year.

This (I think we here would all agree) ludicrous theory is now used whenever nothing else works (without of course accepting that societies can develop sophisticated systems beyond the ken of academics). So, for example, it would seriously be argued that to make a bronze axe head in Birmingham it would be sufficient for Big Chiefs to Swap Wampum (ie tin) many times over from Cornwall to the West Midlands and a quite different set of Big Chiefs to swap copper with each other until some of it also gets to Brum.

The fact that both copper and tin on their own are worthless wampum would not be considered a grave objection. Geddit!

[Hatty]

That very neat summary could go in as a footnote (edited). Important-sounding terms like potlaches nicked from various -ologies litter the pages of important-sounding books.

['Potluck' is an offshoot of potlach such is the way a notion gets transmitted thanks to (apparently left-wing) intelligentsia.]

[Keimpe]

My internet connection had gone on vacation for two days, so I was unable to reply earlier.

I have finished Chapter One and am absolutely thrilled by it!
The 'Saddling Up' part, where the theory is explained, is a real gem. What struck me most, is that you (Mick) were able to write all this without once using your familiar "I'm smart, you're stupid" tone that we've all come to love so much on this forum (and is what makes THOBR such a good read). You've tried really really hard not to make any enemies in the first chapter.

The actual walk seems to be described EXACTLY the way a walker wants his walk to be described ("it's easy to miss the red and white sign that's slightly askew", "the next path is barely visible", etc.). All those useful little details are there. Along with LOADS of extra information.

Please tell me who is writing what. From the looks of it I'm assuming that Mick is writing the theory at the beginning of the chapter, along with the "when you get home" bit, and Hatty is describing the actual walks.

Are they known walks or did you create them yourself? How many times did you go on them before you had them just right?

Some points:

ONE.
This theory is of course groundbreaking. Shouldn't you emphasize it more? Whether on the front page, or before the table of contents or on page five, where the theory is actually explained. It's quite easy to miss right now (I had to read it twice myself - and I already knew it!).

Maybe some text like this should be inserted somewhere?:

yes, you read that correctly:
In this book we are suggesting that all the enigmatic stone circles, henges, menhirs - the lot - together form an ancient roadsign system. And as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, you yourself will prove this hypothesis in the real world (or rather the real British countryside), with this book in hand.

TWO.
Will there be an actual walk in the book that is not circular but is going from A to B using the system described? If not, there oughta be at least one.

THREE.
You could explain leylines a bit more. Maybe by putting a little side note (not a foot note) somewhere on the page in a different colour (there must be a technical name for this, but I don't know it).

Because the origins of ley lines correspond very nicely to your theory as can be read here:[url] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_lines [/url](only read the Old Straight Track part).

This is what Alfred Watkins saw all over Britain:



And because many of these lines passed through villages whose names ended in 'ley' he called them leylines. Nothing mystical about them, whatsoever.

FOUR.
Something I noticed: Chesil beach is a shingle beach. There aren't many of them in the world, but one of them is right on the opposite side of the Channel: Omaha beach, Normandy!

[Hatty]

[Ishmael]

[Keimpe]