Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around,The whole a laboured quarry above ground.
Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around,The whole a laboured quarry above ground.
Lo! what huge heaps of littleness around,The whole a laboured quarry above ground.
The Duke was also a butt for Swift’s sneering muse. The Dean asserts that he lost by speculation what he had gained by fraud.
His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain,With bands of fiddlers to extend his train.
His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain,With bands of fiddlers to extend his train.
His wings are clipped: he tries no more in vain,With bands of fiddlers to extend his train.
After his death the huge construction vanished like aSouth Sea bubble, being literally treated as a quarry for less pretentious buildings, no one caring to buy a home that had cost a quarter of a million, while the sumptuous Duke at one time cherished a project for a town palace in Cavendish Square.
As a relic of his expensive ways, the country hereabouts is still seamed with green roads which he constructed for driving himself about; then, it being no one’s business to keep them up, they have fallen into a state of picturesque abandonment, not altogether admirable in wet weather. The well-greaved pedestrian would find such a by-way on turning right from the tram-line at the end of the village to a house sentinelled by a spreading tree, where this broad, soft lane goes off on the left. When, after a mile of green solitude, it bends back towards the high road, he can take a path continuing its former direction, which leads over the fields to Edgwarebury, a most sequestered hamlet, reached on wheels by another lane from Edgware. Then beside the first house a grassy track mounts to the ridge road near Elstree, from which one has a wide prospect southwards. This road, leading from Elstree to Barnet, is here the edge of Middlesex.
From Edgware to Elstree the highway mounts for three miles, in about two gaining the top of Brockley Hill, the beauty-spot of the road, as is Highwood of the country to its right and Stanmore Common to its left. Brockley Hill is notable to philanthropists for Miss Wardell’s Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home, and to antiquaries as the supposed site of the Roman
RUINED CHURCH AT STANMORERUINED CHURCH AT STANMORE
Sulloniacæ, while all wayfarers may stop here to admire the view upon the northern heights of London. Else, the main interest of this part of Watling Street is its branches along the north side of Canons Park, then again at Brockley Hill, both for Great Stanmore, that lies about a mile to the left, Little Stanmore being analiasof Whitchurch. Hence a footpath wanders across to the larger place, at the crossways outside of which one can turn up a most shady road to come out on the Common, without passing through the village.
Stanmore is a roomy and bowery place, that perhaps owes a certain air of dignified seclusion to the fact of its being reached only by a short branch of the London and North-Western Railway. The first feature that strikes one is the handsome new Church, standing beside the ivied shell of its predecessor, consecrated by Laud, in which some monuments are preserved; but there was an older church that has disappeared. One next observes that Stanmore is uncommonly well off for wealthy inhabitants, to judge by its mansions. The most illustrious of these is Bentley Priory, showing stately on the side of the wooded ridge westward. This, taking its name from an ancient monastery, has had notable owners and visitors. A century ago it was the seat of the Marquis of Abercorn, who entertained here many celebrities, among them Sir Walter Scott while he was revising the proofs of “Marmion.” After the death of William IV. Bentley Priory was occupied by Queen Adelaide, and she died here in 1849. For a time itwas turned into an hotel, and when this enterprise did not prosper, the house was taken for his own residence by a well-known hotel proprietor. Stanmore Park, to the south, houses a school; and a golf-ground stretches below the partly artificial mound of Belmont, looking over to Harrow from its south edge.
On the upper side of the road, mounting beside the grounds of Bentley Priory, spreads Stanmore Common, a fine piece of heath and copsewood, whose knolls and hollows are the highest open ground in Middlesex. When the west end of the Common is left behind by the road, it rises gently to the highest point (503 feet) at the cross-roads, with an “Alpine Coffee House” for hospice. The milestone, some 200 yards ahead, marks the edge of Herts, in which the main road runs on to Bushey and Watford, with turns dropping to Harrow Weald and Pinner, and ways on the other side to Aldenham and Elstree.
At the corner of the Common behind Stanmore Hall, above the village, a path is marked for Elstree, leading down a slope and past a curious obelisk in a circle of trees, which, like the celebrated monument discovered by Mr. Pickwick, bears various interpretations, local legends varying from the tomb of Boadicea to a record of the ending of pursuit after the Battle of Barnet. The red roofs of Elstree soon come in sight, and, to the left of it, the Aldenham Lake, another canal reservoir which plays a fine part in the landscape. Elstree welcomes us into Herts and back to Watling Street, going on greenly to St. Albans, the oldest cityof England, its Roman structures beheld with such wonder by rude Saxon invaders that they attributed it to theWatlinggiants of their mythology: hence the road seems to have taken on this name.
But one might choose rather to turn towards Harrow and the scenes of our next chapter. This we can do delightfully in various ways: by the park-bordered road coming down over Harrow Weald from the highest point of Middlesex; by a beautiful path beginning near Stanmore Church, to wind at the foot of the ridge under the grounds of Bentley Priory; or by a field-way leaving the lowest road to Stanmore on the left, just as it gets out of Edgware, and holding on past Belmont to the green lanes about Kenton. The stranger needs no guidance where the far-seen spire of Harrow makes a beacon.
THEroad to Harrow is as crooked as the Edgware Road is straight. Through Paddington the former takes puzzling turns, in part forced upon it by the great railway terminus; and only beyond the “Royal Oak” station is its course clearly buoyed by red and yellow omnibuses. Browning lived in this quarter, beside the Regent’s Canal, where he found a touch of Venice; but it takes a poet’s eye to discover picturesqueness on the first stages of the Harrow Road, as it mounts between Westbourne Park and Maida Vale to a confluence of half a dozen ways at the “Prince of Wales.” Now choked by a tramway, it passes Kensal Green, London’s largest cemetery, where lie in peace all kinds of celebrities, from princes to authors, beneath a forest of tombstones, spaciously enclosed among streets, chimney stacks, gas-works, railway and canal banks, public houses for the cheering of mutes and mourners—an elaborate contrast to such a country churchyard as might make the weary soul half in love with death.
Thence our road runs on through the town that has grown up about Willesden Junction, which should properly be Harlesden; but, like Clapham Junction, this labyrinth of bridged platforms has made a wide cast for a name. A mile or two further the road is no better than a street; and when it at last gets out into fields across the Brent, the shades of building begin to close upon it again beside Wembley Park, its gaps of green soon becoming more and more filled up by the spasmodic growth of Sudbury, which seems uncertain whether it wants to tack itself on to Wembley or to Harrow. To the north is designed for it a new growth styled the Sudbury Model Garden City, whose placarded promises appear in the fields through which the highway turns shirkingly along the side of Harrow Hill. Henceforth known as the Pinner Road, this is the shortest way to the stations at the lower north end of Harrow, and gives off paths to its high quarters. But to them the arduous approach for wheels is by the loop road climbing the ridge at Sudbury Hill.
An opener way on foot towards Harrow is by the Paddington Canal, that, to the left of the road, indulges in most uncanal-like windings, so as to supply an ornament of the landscape. This may be gained beside Wormwood Scrubs, which, overcast by a gloomy prison, seems one of the least attractive parks of London; nor is the canal bank for a time more pleasant to the eye than to the nose, when one comes in wind of its refuse-destruction stations. But about Alperton it has pretty views of the heights of Ealing and Hanwellacross the sinuous course of the Brent; then, as it gets below Horsendon Hill, that tiny Alp may be ascended for a prospect over green flats broken by straight railway-lines and by the curves of the canal. The most striking feature here is the cluster of red roofs on the wooded top of Harrow Hill, to which we can hold on by paths and lanes. But if we keep the canal bank, our warning to turn off for Harrow will be the group of idle chimneys at Greenford Green, the monument of a ruined industry—those aniline dyes, introduced by Sir W. H. Perkin, which have gone to be made in Germany.
The pleasantest way to Harrow is on the right of its titular road, by Willesden and Neasden. From the Edgware Road one can turn up Willesden Lane, rising as a lane of gentility, or by its loop, Brondesbury Park, leading past the Manor House, transformed into a girls’ boarding-school. This rejoins Willesden Lane where the latter has become the High Road, beyond Willesden Green Station in Walm Lane; then for a time one must bear with a tram-line and other traffic through the meaner part of the place. But at the sign of “The Case is Altered,” leaving the church quarter to the left, a way goes up by the “Spotted Dog” and the Metropolitan Station of Neasden to Neasden Green, here uniting with Dollis Hill Lane along the north side of Gladstone Park. Thence our way on to Harrow is rural—the first mile or so, indeed, being rather commonplace—down to the hollow of the Brent, and up, past the turning for Kingsbury Church, to afork of roads at the top of Blackbird Hill. The left branch leads shadily and windingly above Wembley Park, that ambitious attempt at a north-western pleasure palace, whose stumpy Tower of Babel, long at a stick, will now cease to be a landmark and an eyesore. Beside Barn Hill, on the other hand, one bears to the left under the Metropolitan Railway, then over the London and North-Western Railway, skirting the back quarters of Sudbury, and coming into the highroad below Harrow at the well-named One Hundred Elms Farm. But, if the clay soil be not too well soaked, the pedestrian may take most of his way by field-paths through that green interval pointed out under the head of Kingsbury as refreshingly free from suburbification. I have walked across it on a fine summer evening without meeting a human being once I got off the roads.[B]
[B]In my guideAround London, the main paths over this interval were traced from Harrow, but not outwards, a fault that may be here repaired. The road from Willesden and Neasden forks at the top of its ascent from the Brent. Follow the right branch till it makes a sharp crook, opposite which, over a gate (left), a path mounts the side of a spacious paddock. The stile at the top opens a fine view of the Stanmore and Mill Hill heights, and henceforth the way is most truly rural. Keep the path downwards, which beyond the first hedge turns left over a stile, then, with Harrow Church in view, trends right over a large slope, and wanders into a lane beside a little bridge at Preston. A sign-post opposite shows its continuation to Kenton, crossing two foot-bridges and coming out on the road by a crooked green lane. Across the road, it is continued past Kenton Lodge by a blind by-way, at the turn of which another sign-post points the path on to Edgware. Hence its line is almost straight, made plain by stiles and wicket-gates, over a lane, past a group of red-brick hospital buildings and up a slope, from the top of which one sees Whitchurch nestling among the trees of Canons Park, and the more conspicuous tower of Edgware to the right. In the last field, near a little brook crossed by a foot-bridge, this path joins one from Edgware to Harrow, which of course would make a roundabout route from Kingsbury, yet worth taking for its long stretch of green. The direct way for Harrow is to turn left on the lane from the bridge at Preston, going up to crossways marked by a block of buildings that seem to have strayed out of a London street. Opposite this, on the right, a field-path leads to Woodcock Hill, and across the road here, by the north side of the farm, goes on to Harrow, traversing the North-Western and Metropolitan lines near where they intersect each other.
[B]In my guideAround London, the main paths over this interval were traced from Harrow, but not outwards, a fault that may be here repaired. The road from Willesden and Neasden forks at the top of its ascent from the Brent. Follow the right branch till it makes a sharp crook, opposite which, over a gate (left), a path mounts the side of a spacious paddock. The stile at the top opens a fine view of the Stanmore and Mill Hill heights, and henceforth the way is most truly rural. Keep the path downwards, which beyond the first hedge turns left over a stile, then, with Harrow Church in view, trends right over a large slope, and wanders into a lane beside a little bridge at Preston. A sign-post opposite shows its continuation to Kenton, crossing two foot-bridges and coming out on the road by a crooked green lane. Across the road, it is continued past Kenton Lodge by a blind by-way, at the turn of which another sign-post points the path on to Edgware. Hence its line is almost straight, made plain by stiles and wicket-gates, over a lane, past a group of red-brick hospital buildings and up a slope, from the top of which one sees Whitchurch nestling among the trees of Canons Park, and the more conspicuous tower of Edgware to the right. In the last field, near a little brook crossed by a foot-bridge, this path joins one from Edgware to Harrow, which of course would make a roundabout route from Kingsbury, yet worth taking for its long stretch of green. The direct way for Harrow is to turn left on the lane from the bridge at Preston, going up to crossways marked by a block of buildings that seem to have strayed out of a London street. Opposite this, on the right, a field-path leads to Woodcock Hill, and across the road here, by the north side of the farm, goes on to Harrow, traversing the North-Western and Metropolitan lines near where they intersect each other.
So, by one way or other, we come to Harrow Hill, on which stands up the “visible church” of Charles II.‘s little joke. This hill, or isolated ridge, not so high as Hampstead, with a slighter topping of sand, wears a trim wig of houses and gardens instead of shaggy heath, and most of it is enclosed. The openest part is about the north end, where the church spire rises so conspicuously looking across the Thames Valley to Eton and Windsor, while over smoky London the Crystal Palace may be seen, or even the tower on Leith Hill. To the eye of faith, a dozen counties lie in view. For enjoying this prospect, there are seats on the terrace outside; but the consecrated view-point is that tombstone—railed in from relic-stealing admirers, as graves in Thames-side churchyards were fortified against the ghoulism of body-snatchers—on which Byron loved to lie in pensive reverie, and to gaze at the setting sun. From hisHours of Idlenessit may be gathered
HARROWHARROW
that the discipline of Harrow was looser in that day, when his playfellows seem to have roamed the country somewhat freely and adventurously at risk of “the rustic’s musket aimed against my life,” getting now and then into mischief, as the young poet confesses:
Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,And all the sable glories of his gown.
Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,And all the sable glories of his gown.
Nor shrunk beneath the upstart pedant’s frown,And all the sable glories of his gown.
Their unlicensed sport of Jack-o‘-lantern hunting by night was not put down finally till long after the abolition of the once famous Silver Arrow contest. One feature in Byron’s amusements suggests poetic as well as scholastic license—“the streams where we swam” and “shared the produce of the river’s spoil.” “Ducker” was not yet made; it could hardly be the Paddington Canal that offered “buoyant billows.” “Brent’s cool wave,” if cleaner then, is a matter of three miles off at Perivale, which, as we learn from prosaic authorities, was the favourite bathing-place of that day. Such smaller streams as trickle about Harrow could yield no better spoil than sticklebacks. The one thing wanting to its prospects is a river like the “hoary Thames,” by which rival scholars,
Full many a sprightly race,Disporting on its margin green,The paths of pleasure trace.
Full many a sprightly race,Disporting on its margin green,The paths of pleasure trace.
Full many a sprightly race,Disporting on its margin green,The paths of pleasure trace.
About this height, shining in Dr. Parr’s eyes “with the united glories of Zion and Parnassus,” cluster the buildings of a school that stands high among “our public hives of puerile resort.” The Church had beenbuilt by Lanfranc, when “Herga” was a manor and seat of the Canterbury Primates. The School was founded under Elizabeth by John Lyon, that public-spirited squireen or yeoman of Preston, at which his house still stands, and he has a memorial in the church among other old brasses and ornaments. The tercentenary of his school came in 1871, when a fund was raised among Harrovians to add the new buildings that throw into shade their old schoolroom, boasting the names of Byron, Peel, Palmerston, and others destined to be carved on our national records. The chapel is rather older, but till two generations ago the boys attended the Parish Church. Scattered around are the boarding-houses that have sprung up about a modest nucleus; then further afield come the playing-grounds, almost as important as schoolrooms in contemporary theories of education.
Harrow has had its ups and downs; but long ago it passed out of the rank of a provincial grammar-school, and it now counts some 600 scholars who, what with work and play, have not much time for lying on tombstones and gazing at sunsets. Under rulers of Liberal sentiments, it came to be looked on as rather the Whig public school; yet, as sign of scholastic conservatism, the costume of the upper boys is still the absurd swallow-tail coat of our great-grandfathers, which produces a most incongruous effect when worn with a straw hat and flannel trousers. The Duke of Genoa, who lived with Matthew Arnold, and had the crown of Spain offered him as still a Harrow schoolboy,was precociously bearded while his rank in the school kept him in short jackets; then the arbiters of such matters were for granting him the privilege of “charity tails”; but the young Prince is understood to have refused such a distinction till earned by merit.
That pious founder would rub his eyes could he see to what has grown the school he meant, no doubt, mainly for the benefit of his neighbours’ boys, though he allowed the entrance of “foreigners,” who have ousted the natives. The sons of yeomen and tradesmen are now provided for by a humbler seminary, an inch of the endowment being appropriated to them rather than an ell. But as day-boys are admitted as well as boarders in the masters’ houses, families of the better class have been brought to settle here, to the prospering of Harrow, now expanded with a population of over 10,000, spread out in smart streets and lines of villas that run into once outlying hamlets.
Nearly two miles to the north lies Wealdstone, a village that gives a sub-title to Harrow’s railway station on the London and North Western Railway. The Metropolitan and Great Central station, distinguished as Harrow-on-the-Hill, comes a mile nearer on the same road, at Greenhill. Now the District Railway has an electric line to Roxeth, on the south side of Harrow Hill. The school authorities appear not much concerned to promote close intercourse with Metropolitan distractions; and as yet they have been able to play Canute to the trams threatening to advance from Harlesden. Therein they ill follow the example ofJohn Lyon, who left part of his endowment for improving the roads that, on this heavy clay soil, kept waggons a whole day jolting from Harrow to London.
The meadows round the hill are traversed by foot-ways, some of them, indeed, overlaid by new roads; but there still run many pleasant paths through the fields, and Harrow’s learned masters profess to be able to find their way for a dozen miles across country, with few interruptions of macadam. By such paths, eastwards, one can make for the hamlets of Kenton and Preston, and so on to Edgware or Kingsbury over that interval of open country already mentioned. Westwards, over flatter ground, lie the leafy hamlets we shall come to presently from Pinner. Southwards are reached the still genuine villages of Northholt, Greenford, and Yeading, in that “Pure Vale” of our next chapter. Northwards the wooded brow of Harrow Weald makes a contrast of scenery, to which the straight way is by the populous road through Wealdstone and the further village called Harrow Weald, a name representing the slope of forest now trimmed and enclosed as private parks. Through these the road leads up to the “Hare,” where to the left opens Harrow Weald Common, and a mile further on the cross-roads at the edge of Bushey Heath mark that highest point of Middlesex we have already reached from Stanmore.
It is a good hour’s walk from Harrow Church to its lofty common. Feet impatient of road-tramping can reach it a little more deviously by turning off to the left, nearly a mile beyond Wealdstone, at the “Alma.” This path may seem not very promising at first, but it bends as a bit of road round an enclosure, and ends as a green lane leading up to the road through Hatch End at the foot of the ridge. On the other side of this road, a few paces to the right, opens a narrow path, converging with a better one that goes off through wicket-gates at the corner in the other direction, towards Pinner. This mounts up to a farm and thence to a pretty hamlet bearing the nickname “Harrow Weald City,” beside which one gets on to the Common, a broken and roughly-wooded expanse commanding fine views from its knolls and edges. At the west end is the park enclosure of Graeme’s Dyke House, the home of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, who here figures as a grave magistrate and substantial squire, but elsewhere has dealt in “magic and spells.” The name he spells so is from Grim’s Dyke, a very ancient rampart which has been held to mark the limit of Belgic intrusion among Celtic tribes; but the same name belongs to similar works in other parts of England, and the origin of this one seems uncertain. It may be traced as a slight swell in the meadows to the right of a road hence descending to join Oxhey Lane, the way for Watford, across which a path along the Dyke holds on to Pinner.
The highroad from Harrow to Pinner is not very pleasing in its first stage; but here again the pedestrian may turn a little out of his way with advantage. A lane to the right, near the Recreation Ground, brings him up to the Headstone, now a picturesquely moatedfarm, once a seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and thence a field-path rambles greenly on to Pinner Church. On the other side of the highroad, one could have taken a path, westward from the cricket field below Harrow Church, to the rifle butts, where it ends as a lane presently crooking north to lead into the shady outskirts of Pinner.
Pinner is a good old village that has taken a vigorous new growth on the stalk of the Metropolitan Railway, rooted in the business quarters of London. It still keeps an air of rustic charm among the sophistications of villadom, and it is ringed about with parks and pretty hamlets—Pinner Green further on the road, Eastcote to the south, Woodridings and Hatch End to the north, connected by crooked lanes and green paths, which, indeed, begin to be too often cut up by builders. Its heart may be marked at the station of the Metropolitan line, which here plays the part of landlord as well as carrier. From the railway and the Pin brook, turns up the main street, showing some old houses, real and artificial, as it mounts to the Church, an ancient one, altered and restored with picturesque effect in its shady nook. In the churchyard stands prominent the ivy-wreathed tomb of William Loudon, a Scotsman, who a century ago had the whim of directing that he should be buried above ground, as he is in this curious structure. It is more than a mile on to the London and North Western station, which, near a lordly pile of Commercial Travellers’ schools, marks the north purlieus of the place, whence one can ascend to Harrow Wealdand Bushey Heath by Grim’s Dyke or by the path from Hatch End already mentioned.
On this rising ground it is less easy to miss one’s way; but I despair of helping my reader not to lose himself in the labyrinth of shady roads, muddy, grassy lanes and bowery paths that lead southwards and westwards from Pinner, through a delightful country, difficult to describe without a repetition of hackneyed epithets. The best I can do is to recommend him to No. 1 of a little series of penny guides published at the booking offices of the Metropolitan Railway, in which he has a selection of these ways traced for him; or he might find the west section of my guideAround Londonof use, like other pathfinders of the kind. But the advice I should give myself, if at leisure on a fine day, would simply be to get lost in a leafy maze dotted with guide-posts to keep one from going far astray, even without the help of map and compass.
One ramble of two or three hours to be suggested is by a chain of old-world villages, such as often surprise one in this populous county, as do quaint, tumbledown cottages here and there preserved like flies in the amber of a spick-and-span suburb. But how long will these hamlets keep their rusticity, now that they are threaded by the Metropolitan branch to Uxbridge, not to speak of the new Great Central and Great Western joint line to Wycombe? Before the foul breath of London has blighted them, let my client, by one of two or three ways, make for Eastcote, a most rustic straggling of cottages a mile or two south-westfrom Pinner. When he has got to the end of this village on the road to Ruislip, a bridge on the right shows him where to take a field-path along a brook, then under the edge of the large Park Wood, in which is set Ruislip Lake, another of those canal reservoirs that make such a fine show in Middlesex. It lies to the west side of the wood, through which a way to it might be found from Pinner Green or from the “Ship” of Eastcote.
The village of Ruislip stands to the south of Park Wood, where the Church shows its flint tower set on a rise among fat farms, beside the course of the brook we have followed from Eastcote. This low height marks a watershed, for the brook wanders on by Ickenham and Hillingdon to the Colne, whereas the streams on the other side unite to make the Crane. Ruislip Church is dedicated to St. Martin, as may be guessed from a niched figure on the west front representing that charitable soldier in the act of dividing his cloak; and from its size one may understand how it was no ordinary parish church, but connected with a monastic community, whose land here passed into the hands of a Cambridge college. It ranks among the finest village churches in the county, the parish itself being larger and more populous than appears from the picturesque knot of houses clustered about this central point. The churchyard commands a pleasant prospect over swells of wood and meadow, that fall to duller aspects, cut off by the Metropolitan branch passing to the south of the village.
PINNERPINNER
By a passage beside the picturesque old “Swan,” opposite the Church, there is a way across Ruislip Park, on whose privacy the builder has set seals of doom. This leads into the road for Ickenham, about a mile off, beyond the Great Western Railway station for both villages, each of them having an adjacent “halt” of the Metropolitan line, that begins to sow suburban villas on the fields it has ploughed up, where as yet real cottages bear their crop of ruddy cheeks and hobnailed boots. Ickenham seems a still quieter and quainter hamlet than Ruislip; and its old Church’s shingled spire, set among time-weathered tombs, makes a better match with the surroundings than does the baronial pump by the pond opposite. This, like a true country village, lies under the squirely shadow of Swakeleys, the best-preserved seventeenth-century manor-hall left in Middlesex, if Holland House be put out of account. It was built by a city father shortly before the Civil War, soon after which, when in the hands of another Lord Mayor, it came to be visited with due admiration by Mr. Pepys, who saw there one odd sight, the body of a black boy which his master had dried to keep in a box. The only fault the garrulous diarist had to find with the place was as “not very modern in the garden nor house, but the most uniform in all that ever I saw.”
Swakeleys may be brought to sight by taking a footpath opposite the parsonage, beyond Ickenham Church, which leads into the park. After crossing several stiles, one can follow the right branch of the path intothe drive, passing along the course of a stream that here forms an artificial sheet of water, across which the mansion shows its mellowed front. On coming out of the park, one finds a rising footway on the left, marked “Uxbridge,” which in a mile or so leads to the east end of the town by a road coming over the high ground of Uxbridge Common; or Belmont Road, diverging on the right, would emerge near the west end, passing the Metropolitan Station. Instead of making for Uxbridge from the gate above mentioned, one might turn back by a track through Swakeley Park, giving an excellent view of the mansion from the south-west, well seen also, when the leaves are off, from the lodge on the road between Ickenham and Uxbridge, into which this path leads. A branch of the same road takes one through the Hillingdon Parks to the Uxbridge tram-line, struck a mile or so short of the town, at what is the most Arcadian reach of this rather useful than ornamental highway.
Ruislip and Ickenham may also be gained from Northwood, the next station on the Metropolitan main line, three miles beyond Pinner, where London has again sown a thicket of suburban avenues among patches of wild wood and banks of sand. By the golf-links, to the left of the high-road, a path leads past Ruislip Lake and its woods to an outlying hamlet visited by modest tea-feasters, from which it is a short mile to Ruislip Church; or just beyond Northwood Church, further on, one can take a road to Ickenham or Uxbridge, passing over Duck’s Hill, throughreaches of wood, then almost touching the lake at the hamlet above mentioned, where, by its “Six Bells,” goes off to the right a path for Harefield. On old maps one observes how large a stretch of this leafy ground is Ruislip Common, and it may be as well not to ask how so much of it came to be enclosed as game preserves and such-like.
On the other side of the Metropolitan Railway at Northwood, the Hertfordshire border is marked by the Oxhey Woods, through which one might ramble on past the secluded Oxhey Chapel, and near the London and North-Western main line as a guide to Watford. The high-road reaches the edge of Middlesex at the top of the ascent beyond Northwood Church, where it comes out on Batchworth Heath, a spacious village green about the gates of Moor Park. Here, from an open height of about 350 feet, there is a view over Harrow Hill upon London and the Surrey hills beyond; and hence, by a right of way across the park, one can walk on to Rickmansworth. But to keep in Middlesex one must turn left from the high-road on to high ground over the valley of the Colne, with the Grand Junction Canal running beside it as the straightest way to Uxbridge.
These are only hints of rambles in this hilly and thickly-wooded north-western corner, which one is tempted to proclaim as thebouquetof the county’s scenery. But then, one had another opinion when fresh from the parks and meadows of the north-eastern corner beyond Enfield, or from HampsteadHeath, or from the high ground about Stanmore. Without attempting to adjudge the golden apple among such rivals, let us next turn to a part of Middlesex that can put in no claim to the prize of beauty, although Cobbettfaisait des siennesin spurning its flats as “all ugly.”
ONthe somewhat flat south-western corner of Middlesex, the most zealous advocate may find it more difficult to call evidence to character than on behalf of its northern heights. Yet cyclists and horses might have a good word to say for this plain, over which three main arteries of traffic run from the west end of London—the Uxbridge road, the Great Western road by Slough, and the South-Western road diverging from the latter at Hounslow. Along these highways let us string the spots of interest and beauty that must be confessed to make oases in a part of the county describable as attending rather strictly to business.
From Shepherd’s Bush the Uxbridge road is distinguished by the first long line of electric trams that led out of London to the furthest edge of Middlesex. The Metropolitan boundary is soon crossed as this tram slides into Acton Vale, to the right of which a shabby fragment of Old Oak Common, adjoining Wormwood Scrubs, was once a resort for its mineral wells; and in our own generation a futile attempt wasmade at setting up here a popular pleasure ground. It looks for a little as if the road were getting into open country, but soon the streets of Acton undeceive us, stretching on to Ealing. ThisOak Town, whose first record is as pasture-ground for the Bishop of London’s pigs, has had noble and notable residents in its time, Baxter’sSaints’ Resthaving been written here, as well as some of Bulwer Lytton’s novels. At present it is not an Elysian suburb, even its open spaces being much enclosed as athletic arenas; but it has two bits of park on either side of the highway, and turning up Horn Lane from the rebuilt Church, one comes on a hollow called the Steyne, that gives some hint what the place was in its village simplicity. The pleasantest part of it seems Acton Green, a mile to the south, bordering the “æsthetic” amenities of Bedford Park.
At the west end of Acton, just before the road reaches Ealing Common, stood Fordhook, Fielding’s house, at one time occupied by Byron’s widow, that only since the coming of the tram has given place to homes for reformed Tom Joneses and respectable Pamelas of our generation. Among these spick-and-span houses, the name of a brand-new road, Twyford Avenue, invites the pedestrian to a rural digression. At the top of it, what is still a hedged path leads on under the slope of Hangerhill, a park on which golf has laid its privy paw as on so many about London. This path debouches beside the open space enclosed as Park Royal to make a permanent show-ground for the Royal Agricultural Society, an experiment that proveda failure. Passing to the left, one soon reaches Twyford Abbey on the bank of the Brent, where green slopes and the remains of a fine avenue seem threatened on all sides. To this smallest parish near London a tributary brook gives the name so common among England’s double fords. The modern mansion, titled on surmise of an abbey having once stood here, has quite recently deserved its name by passing to a community of foreign monks, whom the whirligig of time brings to seek refuge in our heretical island. These Catholic owners fail to provide a parson for the adjacent extraparochial chapel or miniature church, that does no credit to the Anglican Establishment. For want of a congregation as well as an officiant, Twyford Church stands secluded in silent decay, not yet come to the point of picturesqueness, its windows broken, its graves neglected, the path leading to it choked by weeds. Hence, turning a mile or so westward down the Brent, one reaches another of the many “smallest churches in England,” whose name, Perivale, has been interpreted asParva; but in old books it bears more than onealias, “Peryfare” and “Purevale.”
The Pure Vale seems to have been a title of admiration given to the rich valley south of Harrow—a name which must have had a wider extent than this tiny parish, if Drayton kept within the bounds of poetic license in making the Colne perceive Perivale “pranked up with wreaths of wheat.” This whole countryside was long famed for wheat, as it now is for hay; and Fuller says of Perivale, what has also been boasted forHeston, near Southall, that it had the honour of supplying flour for the King’s table. Perivale Church is in very different case from its luckless neighbour, its ancient structure well restored and well cared for; and, while each parishioner of the tiny parish might have a couple of pews to himself, on summer Sundays it seldom lacks an overflowing congregation taking excuse for a stroll from Ealing. Ealing, indeed, grows towards it across a green flat, on which the Brent makes sinuous windings as natural hazards for a golf-course.
One might hence follow the river on a byroad, circumventing the tram-line through Ealing and Hanwell, two adjacent places as to which the story is told of Thackeray’s—or who was it?—suggestion to the railway authorities that the porters should be changed who proclaimed them asHealing and ‘Anwell. Ealing is such a favourite residential suburb that it now extends for two miles along the road, and on either side has turned private grounds and mansions into streets and playgrounds. On the right rises the dignified quarter of Castlebar Hill, over which are ways to the new park on the Brent; on the left lies Ealing Common, then, further on, Walpole Park, with its fine old timber, thrown open since the death of Miss Perceval, sister of the murdered Prime Minister, who survived to the beginning of this century as a link with days when Ealing was a Middlesex village, not yet a cantonment of Anglo-Indians and the like. It is not so over-built but that patches of green and pleasant foot-ways are still found about a place which can boast to be the
OLD MANOR HOUSE, NEAR ICKENHAMOLD MANOR HOUSE, NEAR ICKENHAM
birthplace of Huxley and the burial-place of John Horne Tooke. A noted private school here had in its day such pupils, destined to varied fame, as Charles Knight, Thackeray, Newman, and the Lawrence brothers. Bulwer Lytton also was pupil of a clergyman, with whom he seems to have got on less ill than with most of his instructors. In the upper part of Ealing, near its conspicuous water-tower, stands the Princess Helena College, which has made its mark in the new education of girls; and there are other flourishing schools that now may be rearing the philosophers, novelists, and statesmen of the next generation.
We need not ask too closely where Hanwell begins, this suburb being a little shy of its name, shadowed by a huge County Lunatic Asylum, which really belongs to the more idyllic parish of Norwood, to the south. Perhaps the cemeteries on either side of the high-road may be taken as the junction-point, and we are certainly in Hanwell when the tram-road makes an abrupt drop to cross the valley of the Brent. A little way below, the river becomes merged with the Grand Junction Canal, descending at the back of the Asylum by a chain of locks which recall those of Trollhatta or Banavie on a small scale, beside what seems a miniature edition of the Great Wall of China. Walking to Brentford on the tow-path for a couple of miles, one might fancy oneself in the heart of a rather common-place country, where straggling curls of the tamed river show scum almost as green as its banks; but the solitude is disturbed by a tram-line close at hand.
If that by-way is not very attractive, up the Brent one can turn through one of the prettiest bits of Izaac Waltondom so near London. The ground on this side is laid out as a park below the tall viaduct of the Great Western Railway, whose passengers have such a good view of the isolated Church. Behind the church starts a path making a chord to the vagrant bends of the Brent, till the stream turns eastwards beside a road towards Perivale. Across this road the path holds on to the old Church of Greenford, that has some notable relics under its shingled spire and tiled roof, showing through a clump of trees which help the green meadows to bear out the name of the village. The road through Greenford goes on to Harrow by Greenford Green, whose name does not so well answer to its promise of rusticity. But over the fields beside Greenford Church one may take a mile of footpath leading across the canal to Northholt,aliasNorthall, another of those real, quaint, roomy villages that surprise one in out-of-the-way nooks about London, saved from the builder, perhaps, by a heavy clay soil that makes bricks to deface less secluded parishes. As unspoiled as the village seems its weather-worn little Church, standing on a knoll beside the broad sward of roads knotting themselves together here. Northwards one finds a charming path that, ending as a green lane, leads almost into the south suburbs of Harrow. In the other direction the canal bank would bring us back to the road at Southall.
There was a Southholt once, which, corrupted by theevil communications of the high-road, has changed its name as well as its nature. I can remember Southall when it could still be called a pleasant country nook, half village, half distant suburb; but in one generation it has waxed to what it is now, a somewhat commonplace outgrowth of London, which for a time was the tram terminus. It has a weekly cattle market as its most bucolic feature; and there are still some pleasant fields to be found on either side. And that is all to be said about Southall, unless that beside it unite the two branches of the Grand Junction Canal, hence running on straight to West Drayton, where it turns north up the valley of the Colne.
Across the Paddington arm of the canal the highroad comes upon veritable turnip-fields, as it goes on to Uxbridge, passing the hamlets of Hayes, a scattered village whose manor-house made one of the Archbishops of Canterbury’s many seats, the dignity of which seems to survive in the spacious parsonage. The fine restored Church contains some old monuments, notably, beside the altar, Sir Edward Fenner’s tomb with coloured effigy; it has also a much-faded wall painting of St. Christopher in the north aisle, and a discarded altar-piece representing the “Adoration of the Magi.”
Hayes Town, as the church precinct styles itself, lies to the left of the way, down a turning opposite the “Adam and Eve.” On the right the Yeading brook waters a stretch where itself seems the pleasantest feature. Here comes another of those odd blanks in the map ofMiddlesex, a flat of sodden green, looking at home when wrapped in a November mist, through which loom snug farmhouses, but it is else so unpopulated that only one road runs across it, by Yeading to Ruislip and Ickenham. Bold explorers, perhaps, might here find a touch of adventure in trespassing against notices which block approach to that devious brook, over a country of such agricultural note that it is not to be sneezed at unless by sufferers from hay fever. The Yeading Brook, further down promoted to the title of the Crane River, should have observance as the largest stream belonging entirely to Middlesex. It rises in two forks on the slopes about Harrow, and after flowing right across the county, has two mouths into the Thames, one of them with the by-name of the Isleworth River.
As the tram approaches Uxbridge, the scenery on the right improves in the swelling parks of Hillingdon, through which leafy lanes and paths wind over to Swakeleys and Ickenham. This, indeed, is one of the pleasantest square miles in Middlesex, filled up with the grounds and gardens of goodly mansions; and the golfers, upon whom one of its slopes seems wasted, have a better chance of attending to their game on less comely enclosures passed further back. Should any pedestrian doubt my word for it, let him turn up to the right opposite Hillingdon Church, by the “Vine,” following this by-way as far as the lodge gate of Hillingdon House on the left, just beyond which he may take a path through the park, to be brought back to the highroad as it enters Uxbridge, with little deviation
UXBRIDGEUXBRIDGE
from his straight way. But, first, he would do well to stop at Hillingdon Church, a spaciously handsome one, containing brasses and monuments, conspicuous among them the Onslow and Paget tombs on either side of the altar. In the churchyard is the tomb of Rich, the celebrated harlequin and lessee of Covent Garden.
Hillingdon was the mother church of Uxbridge, whose long main street is sentinelled, a mile further on, by the tall modern spire of St. Andrew’s; then, further along, the older Parish Church stands hidden behind the Market Hall, so closely squeezed into the same block of building that there is no room for a chancel. This border borough, thriving on corn-mills and other industries, has more the look of an independent market town than any in Middlesex. Till lately a certain awkwardness of communications kept Uxbridge rather out of the way, served only by a branch from the Great Western Railway at West Drayton, as it once was by slow canal-boats; but now it has a Metropolitan line from Harrow, besides the electric tram that runs through it to the top of the descent by which the road falls to cross the Colne. The meaning of the name has been matter of controversy, but probably this bridge was christened from the Celtic word for water that appears inusk,esk,axe,uisk,whiskey, and other forms.
Uxbridge has a population of some 9,000, its thickly inhabited outskirts left out of account. The chief event in its history is the meeting here in 1645 ofCommissioners appointed by Charles I. and the Parliament to negotiate terms of peace. The mansion in which their fruitless deliberations were held has been much altered, and is now an inn, but it still proudly exhibits itself as the “Treaty House” by the road at the west end of the town, and part of the interior is preserved in its old dignity. The sign of this inn was an inheritance from the “Crown,” at which the King’s Commissioners lodged, those of the Parliament finding quarters at the “George,” further back in the chief street. Beyond the “Treaty House,” first crossing the canal by a very Piscatorish-looking tavern and a large mill, we pass the Colne into Buckinghamshire.
The finest scenery about Uxbridge comes over the river in the county on which we must here turn our backs. Good Pisgah views of it can be had from the high ground of Uxbridge Common to the north of the town, by which goes out an airy road towards Rickmansworth, with branches for the quiet villages we visited from Pinner. Southwards the road by the river and the canal is not so pleasant, populated by various industries about Cowley, in whose churchyard was buried Dr. Dodd, the divine hanged for forgery, 1777. But opener and more agreeable country is reached at West Drayton, where, having passed its scattered hamlets on the canal, we find houses not so thick as good old trees about its green, and picturesque nooks by the branching swirls of the Colne. From the Church, enclosed in a park to the left, a fine avenue leads southwards, ending in paths and lanes that, by thevillages of Harmondsworth or Harlington, make pleasant ways into the central western highway.
This, once renowned as the Bath Road, begins for Londoners with Piccadilly, leading by the south side of the Park to Kensington, Hammersmith, then by Chiswick, Turnham Green, and Gunnersbury to the busy end of Kew Bridge, lately rebuilt. Beyond, it enters the main street of Brentford, so narrow that one calls out at finding this thoroughfare choked with a tram-line, as it once was with flying Roundheads in a hot fight of the Civil War.
Brentford is styled the county town of Middlesex, but has little honour in its own country; and if its two fabulous kings were content to sit here on one throne, the County Council prefers a more dignified seat at Westminster. Like Washington or Ottawa, indeed, it seems to be an artificial capital, originally having no rank but as dependency of the adjoining parishes of Ealing and Hanwell. This dirty place, besides bearing an old bad name for bear-baitings, election riots, and the like disorders, has been a butt for metropolitan poets ever since Falstaff was disguised and drubbed as the fat witch of Brentford. The author of theRehearsalmade it the scene for his burlesque. Johnson satirically coupled its name with Glasgow, in which he showed his ignorance, as all travellers of that century insist on the neatness and prettiness of the Clyde city before its days of grimy wealth. Thomson, in hisCastle of Indolence, takes this “town of mud” to be a fit stage for pig-driving,where motor-cars now “gruntle to each other’s moan”; Goldsmith unkindly suggests it as goal for a race between “a turnip-cart, a dust-cart, and a dung-cart”; and other contemporary bards affect the same nose-holding attitude towards poor Brentford, their complaints, as a certain guide-book dryly says, being in our day echoed by sanitary inspectors. Of late the squalid county seat shows grace to be somewhat ashamed of itself, and has a scheme in view for sweeping and garnishing. Let us hurry through its show of gas-works, chimney-stacks, dingy wharves and slums about the mouth of the Brent, only noticing that at the Church and the Town Hall, near the bridge, the place attains a certain point of quaint ugliness not without attraction, and that its squalid waterside features set in relief the blooming of Kew Gardens across the Thames. There are some pleasanter aspects to the right, where, by Old Brentford and Boston House, the town begins to merge with the spreading outskirts of Ealing; but as to New Brentford, as it once was, its motto should beGuarda e passa.
When the road has crossed the Brent it passes, on the left side, the noble demesne of Syon House, which the tram-traveller might flit by unawares but for an ornate gate revealing the grounds. From a right-of-way crossing the park to Isleworth Church on the river bank, can be had a fuller view of the mansion, crowned by that lion so long familiar to Londoners over Northumberland House, there said, on some such authority as that local worthy, the late Mr. Joe Miller’s,