The old straight track : its mounds, beacons, moats, sites, and markstones by Watkins Alfred 1885-1935

Author:Watkins, Alfred, 1885-1935
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Roads, Prehistoric, Mounds, Megalithic monuments
Publisher: London : Methuen
Published: 1948-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

and direct. Not until sun alignment and the sighted

track had decayed came the entirely different use in mediaeval days as a warning signal.

It probably had its first use to fix the point of seasonal sunrise, for when a place had been found from which the sun could be seen to rise over some Beltany Hill or May Hill on May Day, the fire on their summit took position as a symbol—for the sun itself rose somewhere else a week later—and as a means of laying out the alignment and the track which was made.

A large number of beacon hills and points are found in any part of the Kingdom, most of them lofty hills with unmistakable names, as Pen-y-Beacon, the Breconshire, Worcestershire (Fig. 78), and Herefordshire (Fig. 79) Beacons, Treleck Beacon. Other hill-top names (elsewhere explained) seem also to indicate use as fire beacon points. Such are Firle Beacon, Tan Hill, Solsbury Hill, Black Hill, Cole’s Hill (Fig. 80), Midsummer Hill, May Hill, The Beck, Bexhill.

Evidence is clear as to the early use of these fires. The words “ beacon ” and “ beckon ” (both Anglo-Saxon) are from identical roots, and both mean “ come to me.” Macaulay has hammered into our minds forcibly the mediaeval use of beacons as danger and warning signals. “ Till twelve fair counties saw the blaze on Malvern’s lonely height,” is good, sonorous declamation, although it raises a smile to those who know that the writer could never have really noticed the serrated ridge of the Malvems, with the Worcestershire

no

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