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The Dodman Quest
David's summer, looked forward to for so long, is suddenly ruined by illness. Life has become a misery. Then he is set a challenge by his lively neighbour Gill. Can they solve a puzzle which has fascinated people for many years -- do ley lines really exist? Is it possible that prehistoric men were clever enough to find their way over great distances by laying out grids of straight tracks? Persuaded by the idea of proving right a fellow Herefordian, Alfred Watkins, who first suggested the possibility in his book The Old Straight Track, David accepts the challenge. He and Gill have no idea of the strange territory into which their detective work will take them when they set out together on the trail of the Dodman. A book for teenagers and interested adults.
176 pages, Paperback
Published July 31, 2005
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August 17, 2024
This book was brought to my attention by a dear Goodreads friend who knew I was interested in the intersection of ley lines and juvenile fiction. And on that front it certainly delivers.
David Granger, 14 and a keen cricketer, has been brought low with glandular fever. Well wishers visiting him in his sick bed include two pun-loving jokester mates; the comely, would-be-junior-thespian neighbour Gill (Gilly, Gillian) Flower; the local vicar; and Bill Gooding, David's Geography teacher and cricket coach, who fatefully brings him a map of Hereford and The Old Straight Track : The Classic Book on Ley Lines by local man Alfred Watkins.
Now, if you're not familiar with good ol' Alf's work, I can summarize it briefly: some dude decided that the ancients of Briton had built their places of worship (dolmens, etc., later replaced or built over with early Roman temples and the first Christian churches) on straight axes stretching across the map, connecting geographical high points and sacred groves, springs, etc., and then altars or other structures would be deliberately placed at crossing points where one axis met another.
This theory, weakly supported and rather unscientific (but very romantic and fun, let's be honest!), has been largely discredited by.. well, most scientifically minded people, and the vast majority of historians and archeologists, etc. But ley lines seem to capture the imagination, and I personally honestly think there is probably some validity to Watkins' idea - only for me, that would be bounded hyper-locally, and building a sacred altar along the line of the sun shining through a cleft in a nearby mountain at midsummer, for example, wouldn't surprise me in the least. What I have a problem with, which is what other methodical people object to, is the all encompassing projection of this plausible local phenomenon being applied outward to the entire globe. Then we get into some Illuminati-level wishful and magical thinking about some secret, world-wide conspiracy of lines of power, etc. And this is where it falls apart. And it's also what drove me bonkers about this book, too.
Not only are the characters quite cardboard (but an attempt was made, so we'll overlook that), but these two teens spend their entire summer absolutely obsessed with uncovering the secret of the 'Dodman' - a mystical figure presumably proposed by Watkins, working in conjunction with a 'Coleman' - who was, essentially, a pre-historical surveyor. (The next time I see a bored intern holding a pole with a sighting marker for the person using a scope across the way, I'll be tempted to point and shout "DOD!" at their face. And no one will get the reference). The Dodmen, one of which is pictured as a chalk-carving holding staves on the cover, was one of the architects of these venerable old straight tracks, and so David and Gill try to track down his presence... linguistically.
It should be said that I'm not a linguist, nor a language teacher (as the author was). But I am a scientist, and I could hardly bear to read this, erm, methodology. The entire exercise is a textbook example of confirmation bias and uncontrolled research. They start well enough, looking at the local historical dialects, seeing if the prefix (or suffix) of DOD- is showing up on the map at waypoints, hummocks, ponds, crossroads, churches, etc. They do some digging and decide to include DUD- and DOT- and TOT- and TOD- and TUT-, etc., spelling variants, and expand fuzzily along. They look at proto-Germanic languages (not very well - they didn't give much attention to the Anglo-Saxon language because it wasn't showing them what they wanted, and what drove me nuts is that they didn't even talk about DEAD and TOD being potential confounding word forms - they did think DEADMAN could be a corruption of DODMAN... As if an unexplained corpse would be less memorable to locals than the memory of some prehistoric roadworks crew). Alright, so we're already getting into the very fuzzy, confirmation bias zone. I was totally prepared to run with this as the plot developed, as they used rulers to mark potential ley lines (and a farm that ALMOST fits, let's include it! And this church is a little off, but near enough!. etc.). It's worth pointing out at this juncture that, in 2005, the kids decide to completely eschew the internet for research ("They can't have put all world languages on disc" - on disc?! 2005?!). Some 20 years later, I can't help but think that AI would be *THE* tool to map ancient tracks for us...
Anyway, rather than, you know, explore more about the DOD- connections locally, they decide to expand it to ALL world languages (and then just pick some random ones they can get dictionaries for. Again, 2005 - the internet might not contain all known word variants from all languages, extinct or extant, but it would certainly have the major ones!), from ALL points in history no less, based on.... on what?! I mean, it's so spurious at this point that I'm just getting angry! YES, Sanskrit is an ancient language in the same 'family' as English, and there could be some overlap. But at NO POINT do these characters, adults and librarians included, ever ask these key questions:
1. What are ley lines, and why would they extend from Hereford around the world?
2. What communication or correspondence or physical overlap would Polynesians, Australian aboriginies and Ancient Egyptians have with each other, let alone the ancient Celts? (Greek gets briefly thrown into the mix, because they decide DAEDELUS fits a DOD- structure! But we don't talk about trade routes or invasions or anything...)
3. Why haven't they figured out that virtually EVERY language on earth has a Mama and Papa/Dada cognate?! Because they all do, and that's because human mouths can make such noises easily and infants just naturally seem to lean that way... I mean, c'mon - just because some obscure African language and another obscure Himalayan one have a word beginning with a D (or TCH- or DJ- or TZH- or CH-....) that vaguely refers to travel / poles / track / straight / wisdom / motion / wise / man / mound (horizontal or vertical - not picky here!) / sight, does NOT mean that they were AT ALL related (or that those definitions have ANY connection to each other, outside of their own construct of interest!)! I mean, there are only so many sounds the human mouth can make, and seeing as we're all human, there's bound to be coincidence
4. Why didn't they use a 'control' in this? Find another word relating to the ancient Hereford geography and drudism or something and see how that corresponds?
(Again, why would the Australian outback aboriginals be using a DODMAN word, and why would the ancient Egyptians?! Let's say, for the sake of argument, that somehow track-making around the world was a conserved, single approach, AND that this process was taught and spread around the globe readily, and adopted by all communities (to what purpose?! But nevermind! For the sake of argument!), then WHY would it be presumed that the "D" noise would even remain?! I mean, yes, I can see how a word used by the Celts for something could be picked up by the Angles or Saxons or the Normans and preserved, somewhat mutated, into modern English. This sort of this happens all the time, because it's local and names tend to stick. But Zande? Tibetan? Navajo?!?! Are you shitting me?!). Consider the following: some ancients from another land show up with poles, teach the locals the way to make straight tracks (because... yeah, everyone likes to walk straight up and over mountains and through the centre of bogs?), and they really hammer home the "Me, Cole. He, Dod." Tarzan-esque labelling and introductions. Fine. Are you seriously suggesting that millenia later, when said locals develop written language (and sufficiently document it on materials that don't rot away in the short term), they'd still be calling the surveyor dudes something like "Coll" and "Dudda"? Remember that time Steve-the-Idiot tripped over the ceremonial pole last midsummer and ruined the rite, and we all laughed so hard we cried? And we started referring to clumsiness as 'pulling a Steve', and started to call all poles Steve-rods, because it was both relevant to our own history and also because it was fricking funny? Millenia later, someone takes a look at our language and sees a drawing of Steve-the-Klutz and his stupid poles, totally fails to get the context of that joke as well, and says, "Ah! Steve! CLEARLY a mutation of the word STAVE! And look - this guy is named Rod - the Rodman! CLEARLY that was a corruption of 'Dodman'!" Well no, it wasn't. Just because it could be, doesn't mean it was. Sometimes there's coincidence. And always there is a confirmation bias. It's just how our brains trend. It needs to be examined and kept in check.... Anyway, I digress.
The entire book chock-full of extreme wishy-washiness. Here's just one example, and it's not even the most egregious:
At the end of the book, Gill waxes poetic about The Dark Is Rising, her favourite book, and they put in a few quotations from it. Because it is my favourite book (and got me thinking about ley lines in the first place!), I probably rounded this up from 1 star to a more generous 2.
The book is almost entirely as the excerpt above shows, with many weak 'track' and 'dod' puns to endure. I cannot recommend it to anyone with a methodical or scientific mind, but it might be of passing interest to... someone... I guess. :S An attempt was made, anyway.
(EDIT: I reduced this to 2 stars because, while reflecting upon this in the shower, I realised that I can't say 'I liked it', and so 2 is a more fair rating. It was okay. That's about it.).
David Granger, 14 and a keen cricketer, has been brought low with glandular fever. Well wishers visiting him in his sick bed include two pun-loving jokester mates; the comely, would-be-junior-thespian neighbour Gill (Gilly, Gillian) Flower; the local vicar; and Bill Gooding, David's Geography teacher and cricket coach, who fatefully brings him a map of Hereford and The Old Straight Track : The Classic Book on Ley Lines by local man Alfred Watkins.
Now, if you're not familiar with good ol' Alf's work, I can summarize it briefly: some dude decided that the ancients of Briton had built their places of worship (dolmens, etc., later replaced or built over with early Roman temples and the first Christian churches) on straight axes stretching across the map, connecting geographical high points and sacred groves, springs, etc., and then altars or other structures would be deliberately placed at crossing points where one axis met another.
This theory, weakly supported and rather unscientific (but very romantic and fun, let's be honest!), has been largely discredited by.. well, most scientifically minded people, and the vast majority of historians and archeologists, etc. But ley lines seem to capture the imagination, and I personally honestly think there is probably some validity to Watkins' idea - only for me, that would be bounded hyper-locally, and building a sacred altar along the line of the sun shining through a cleft in a nearby mountain at midsummer, for example, wouldn't surprise me in the least. What I have a problem with, which is what other methodical people object to, is the all encompassing projection of this plausible local phenomenon being applied outward to the entire globe. Then we get into some Illuminati-level wishful and magical thinking about some secret, world-wide conspiracy of lines of power, etc. And this is where it falls apart. And it's also what drove me bonkers about this book, too.
Not only are the characters quite cardboard (but an attempt was made, so we'll overlook that), but these two teens spend their entire summer absolutely obsessed with uncovering the secret of the 'Dodman' - a mystical figure presumably proposed by Watkins, working in conjunction with a 'Coleman' - who was, essentially, a pre-historical surveyor. (The next time I see a bored intern holding a pole with a sighting marker for the person using a scope across the way, I'll be tempted to point and shout "DOD!" at their face. And no one will get the reference). The Dodmen, one of which is pictured as a chalk-carving holding staves on the cover, was one of the architects of these venerable old straight tracks, and so David and Gill try to track down his presence... linguistically.
It should be said that I'm not a linguist, nor a language teacher (as the author was). But I am a scientist, and I could hardly bear to read this, erm, methodology. The entire exercise is a textbook example of confirmation bias and uncontrolled research. They start well enough, looking at the local historical dialects, seeing if the prefix (or suffix) of DOD- is showing up on the map at waypoints, hummocks, ponds, crossroads, churches, etc. They do some digging and decide to include DUD- and DOT- and TOT- and TOD- and TUT-, etc., spelling variants, and expand fuzzily along. They look at proto-Germanic languages (not very well - they didn't give much attention to the Anglo-Saxon language because it wasn't showing them what they wanted, and what drove me nuts is that they didn't even talk about DEAD and TOD being potential confounding word forms - they did think DEADMAN could be a corruption of DODMAN... As if an unexplained corpse would be less memorable to locals than the memory of some prehistoric roadworks crew). Alright, so we're already getting into the very fuzzy, confirmation bias zone. I was totally prepared to run with this as the plot developed, as they used rulers to mark potential ley lines (and a farm that ALMOST fits, let's include it! And this church is a little off, but near enough!. etc.). It's worth pointing out at this juncture that, in 2005, the kids decide to completely eschew the internet for research ("They can't have put all world languages on disc" - on disc?! 2005?!). Some 20 years later, I can't help but think that AI would be *THE* tool to map ancient tracks for us...
Anyway, rather than, you know, explore more about the DOD- connections locally, they decide to expand it to ALL world languages (and then just pick some random ones they can get dictionaries for. Again, 2005 - the internet might not contain all known word variants from all languages, extinct or extant, but it would certainly have the major ones!), from ALL points in history no less, based on.... on what?! I mean, it's so spurious at this point that I'm just getting angry! YES, Sanskrit is an ancient language in the same 'family' as English, and there could be some overlap. But at NO POINT do these characters, adults and librarians included, ever ask these key questions:
1. What are ley lines, and why would they extend from Hereford around the world?
2. What communication or correspondence or physical overlap would Polynesians, Australian aboriginies and Ancient Egyptians have with each other, let alone the ancient Celts? (Greek gets briefly thrown into the mix, because they decide DAEDELUS fits a DOD- structure! But we don't talk about trade routes or invasions or anything...)
3. Why haven't they figured out that virtually EVERY language on earth has a Mama and Papa/Dada cognate?! Because they all do, and that's because human mouths can make such noises easily and infants just naturally seem to lean that way... I mean, c'mon - just because some obscure African language and another obscure Himalayan one have a word beginning with a D (or TCH- or DJ- or TZH- or CH-....) that vaguely refers to travel / poles / track / straight / wisdom / motion / wise / man / mound (horizontal or vertical - not picky here!) / sight, does NOT mean that they were AT ALL related (or that those definitions have ANY connection to each other, outside of their own construct of interest!)! I mean, there are only so many sounds the human mouth can make, and seeing as we're all human, there's bound to be coincidence
4. Why didn't they use a 'control' in this? Find another word relating to the ancient Hereford geography and drudism or something and see how that corresponds?
(Again, why would the Australian outback aboriginals be using a DODMAN word, and why would the ancient Egyptians?! Let's say, for the sake of argument, that somehow track-making around the world was a conserved, single approach, AND that this process was taught and spread around the globe readily, and adopted by all communities (to what purpose?! But nevermind! For the sake of argument!), then WHY would it be presumed that the "D" noise would even remain?! I mean, yes, I can see how a word used by the Celts for something could be picked up by the Angles or Saxons or the Normans and preserved, somewhat mutated, into modern English. This sort of this happens all the time, because it's local and names tend to stick. But Zande? Tibetan? Navajo?!?! Are you shitting me?!). Consider the following: some ancients from another land show up with poles, teach the locals the way to make straight tracks (because... yeah, everyone likes to walk straight up and over mountains and through the centre of bogs?), and they really hammer home the "Me, Cole. He, Dod." Tarzan-esque labelling and introductions. Fine. Are you seriously suggesting that millenia later, when said locals develop written language (and sufficiently document it on materials that don't rot away in the short term), they'd still be calling the surveyor dudes something like "Coll" and "Dudda"? Remember that time Steve-the-Idiot tripped over the ceremonial pole last midsummer and ruined the rite, and we all laughed so hard we cried? And we started referring to clumsiness as 'pulling a Steve', and started to call all poles Steve-rods, because it was both relevant to our own history and also because it was fricking funny? Millenia later, someone takes a look at our language and sees a drawing of Steve-the-Klutz and his stupid poles, totally fails to get the context of that joke as well, and says, "Ah! Steve! CLEARLY a mutation of the word STAVE! And look - this guy is named Rod - the Rodman! CLEARLY that was a corruption of 'Dodman'!" Well no, it wasn't. Just because it could be, doesn't mean it was. Sometimes there's coincidence. And always there is a confirmation bias. It's just how our brains trend. It needs to be examined and kept in check.... Anyway, I digress.
The entire book chock-full of extreme wishy-washiness. Here's just one example, and it's not even the most egregious:
"Yes," Mr Thomas went on, "I'm convinced that Alfred Watkins would very much approve of your undertaking. He was a man of great vision and enthusiasm. Well, I will leave you to further research. You are quite right to pursue your 'treasure hunt' as widely as possible . . . You might find the god Thoth of interest".There is no summation, no conclusion, no over-arching theory or reason postulated about this presumed concordance in language, or what it portends. It just sort of ends with David and Gill congratulated for all their hard work and research, and when David recovers, they go and walk a bit of one of the local tracks (not well described - that would have been the best bit, as far as I was concerned).
He left David only too ready to take a lucky dip into Ancient Egyptian. After all, he persuaded his lively conscience, he'd only promised Gill not to make a start on the Fiji!
By the time Gill returned, in mid-afternoon, he'd listed all the seemingly relevant worlds beginning with T and become increasingly frivolous in the doing:
TAT - to suckle...interesting, in view of TEAT in English, but perhaps not really appropriate here!
TATENEN - an ancient earth god, one of the creators....hey! very similar to the Sanskrit...what was it?...TAITLA...TATENEN... Yes! change that first N or L and 'good old DAEDALUS' would pop up again!... Definitely an Ancient Egyptian DODMAN!... No question... By the time he'd reached Britain, he was only creating tracks and had lost his god-like status, but nevertheless... This was as good as he could possibly have hoped for!
TUT - god, likeness, statue.... OK, they were likely to make statues of their best men!
TENTEN - to be strong... that was getting to be a popular idea - strong = powerful
THANT - poles... for putting up tents, perhaps? Oh, flippant, David! Slap on the wrist!
THATHA - to gallop, or stamp with the feet . . .Obviously the A.E.s liked making a noise when they were going along their tracks!
TET - pylon, doorpillar, gateway... No, no comment about electricity, thank you . . . .
TATA - to give, set, place... Get your tracks laid out here, ladies and gents!
TUTA - evil man and TUTI - god of evil... a bit disconcerting... did some later A.E. want to discredit the good old DODMAN? Mm... tricky....
THOTH or TEHUTI (DOD with a stutter?) - the Measurer, the bringer of writing... this was the chap Mr T. mentioned... Writing not really of interest, but 'measuring' very good.
As he worked his way through, too engrossed with his findings to linger over the actual hieroglyphs, which, at another time would have demanded detailed scrutiny, he noticed a word for crowd or assembly - TAT or TATA. It again reminded him of something in Sanskrit. He found his notes. Yes.... TATI, in Sanskrit, meant a crowd or multitude!... Strange how links seemed to exist in DOD words not directly connected to tracks! Hang on, though.. Hadn't Alf claimed that places on the track were used for meetings of all kinds? So the crowds might be relevant after all... This was getting quite complicated.
As he'd hoped, Gill didn't seem to mind that he'd gone out on a limb with the Egyptian.
They discussed the new 'crowd' theory, and she was inclined to go along with it
At the end of the book, Gill waxes poetic about The Dark Is Rising, her favourite book, and they put in a few quotations from it. Because it is my favourite book (and got me thinking about ley lines in the first place!), I probably rounded this up from 1 star to a more generous 2.
The book is almost entirely as the excerpt above shows, with many weak 'track' and 'dod' puns to endure. I cannot recommend it to anyone with a methodical or scientific mind, but it might be of passing interest to... someone... I guess. :S An attempt was made, anyway.
(EDIT: I reduced this to 2 stars because, while reflecting upon this in the shower, I realised that I can't say 'I liked it', and so 2 is a more fair rating. It was okay. That's about it.).
December 14, 2017
I liked this book since the first page, it was fantastic!
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