ANTIQUITY OF THE LEY.
The word “ancient” covers a vast period. If—as I have proved—the tumps or burys are sighting tumps, excavations also prove that they usually date back to the Neolithic age, which, according to Mr. Ault’s recent “Early Life in Britain,” cannot be later than 2,000 B.C., and may be 4,000 B.C. A prehistoric trackway might, therefore, be planned and made more than three thousand years before the Old Road (which is a route rather than a road) was devised or evolved—as Mr. Belloc so well describes—as a Pilgrim’s Way from Winchester to Canterbury.
I have found that the persistent things down the ages are not the courses of the roads or tracks, but their sighting points, and that cross roads with a place name are such. Place names are also persistent, some of them going back to prehistoric times, but others evidently mediæval. But the real dating of the leys and when the system fell into decay is for future investigation.
INDIVIDUALITY OF A LEY.
Each ley or track was as separate and distinct from other leys as each animal or tree is an organism distinct from other animals or trees. As they crossed each other, no doubt users often transferred from one to the other at the crossing, and struck out in an altered direction, hence the place name element “turn.” But the way thus travelled was a route, not a road. It is an absurdity to speak of a sighted road having branches, or bending. Each individual track was “a long lane that has no turning.”
Previous writers, treating, say, of Roman or of mediæval roads, not knowing of the existence of the ley, assume that they are speaking of original primary structures, when they are only describing a route evolved from a number of the leys I describe, retaining the sighted structure in the case of Roman roads, but losing most of it by mediæval times.
Many leys acquired in after ages individual names from the use they were put to, and such names were transferred to the sighting points.
I find in several cases a group of leys with sighting points passing quite close to, and taking no notice of, quite a distinct group of leys with other sighting points, the two sets being either of two different periods, or part of separate systems made by different sets of ley-men living in different districts.
A most surprising fact is the enormous number of leys.