"The making of an English countryside"

When Alfred Watkins first mooted the existence of ancient trackways in the British countryside which he called ‘leys’ in 1922, he wanted to show how forgotten lessons about our past could still be visible to us in the landscape today - if we’re willing to look. This comic asks what it means to be ‘of the British countryside’ right now in this shitty period of history, and whether the millennia of deep history in the soil beneath our feet can tell us anything about what comes next.

Simon Moreton is a zine maker and cartoonist, based in Bristol, UK. He self-published the comic series SMOO between 2008 and 2015. His debut graphic novel, ‘Plans We Made’, was published by Uncivilized Books in 2015. He has also been published by Kilgore Books, Retrofit, and Avery Hill Publishing. He started ‘Minor Leagues’, a biannual zine of comics and prose in 2016, in which he serialised ‘Where?’ a major project exploring life, death, grief, and history in the British countryside.

Alfred Watkins (1855 - 1935) was an entrepreneur, brewer, businessman, photographer, and antiquarian from Hereford, UK. He is best known for proposing the idea of ‘leys’, trackways in the prehistoric countryside that joined up hills, lakes, and rivers, with human-made features like holloways, stone circles, mounds, cairns, barrows and latterly churches, into straight lines. He suggested these were routes used for transport, trade, and ritual. He detailed his findings in three works: ‘Early British Trackways’ (1922) ‘The Old Straight Track’ (1925) and ‘The Ley Hunter’s Manual’ (1927).

24 pages, Moss Ink (Gold on cover), Risographed, Saddle-stitched. May 2020