Chapter IX: Beating the Bounds 149 (5)

town-house at the Adelphi, and was lord of Hendon Manor; few actors have managed to be so prudent, so prosperous, and so well off for “the things that make death terrible,” as was Johnson’s comment on his old pupil’s display. Sir Christopher Wren retired to a home on Hampton Green, about which there remain several houses and gardens where wigs and ruffles would look hardly out of place. New Hampton, to the north, is more commonplace, where Hampton’s railway-station, on the Shepperton branch, stands half an hour’s walk from the palace. About as far to the north of this line is Hanworth, traversed by the artificial Queen’s or Cardinal’s River formerly mentioned, and once distinguished by a Tudor hunting-lodge which became the home of Henry VIII.‘s lucky widow.

By its Thames Street, Hampton straggles on towards Sunbury, where the river is broken by eyots, weirs, and a deep shady cut on the Surrey side. This village, too, contains good old-fashioned houses as well as new ones, stretching back from its Church on the bank to the station a mile behind, where another royal residence is believed to have stood in Kempton Park, now degraded into a race-course. Close to Sunbury is Upper Halliford, by which a road takes a straighter line into the neighbouring parish of Shepperton, cutting across a bend of the river opposite Walton-on-Thames. Shepperton is a more scattered place, containing several hamlets and strings of villas connected by roads that seldom want the true Middlesex wealth of hedgerow timber.

Here at last we seem to be getting into open country, and away from riverside villas. A summer encampment at the end of Walton Bridge left out of account, the next place reached on the river is the pretty group of houses and inns called Lower Halliford, a little above the bridge. This ford makes the scene of a hot antiquarian controversy as to whether or no Cæsar here crossed the Thames, fortified against him by the Cowey Stakes, which some take rather for an ancient fishing weir; and his point of crossing is variously maintained to have been at Brentford, Kingston, and Wallingford, while traces and traditions of Roman camps on either side the river help out the case for Halliford. _Non nostrum tantas_, etc. An authentic claim to note for Lower Halliford is as the home of Thomas Love Peacock, an author too little known to the general reader, though his humorous novels were spread out over nearly half a century, from the days when he caricatured Shelley and Coleridge, through the period of Brougham’s patronage of useful knowledge, to that when competitive examinations gave him a fresh target for ridicule. By an audience fit, though few, he is not forgotten; and for the sake of his wit he may be forgiven such thoughtless gibes as that “Scotchmen would be the best people in the world if there was nobody but themselves to give them characters.” There is reason to believe, indeed, that even before his deathbed this audacious writer repented the profanity with which he bespattered our modern Athens. The plan, at least, of Peacock’s books was revived for our generation in Mr. Mallock’s _New Republic_; but Peacock strikes a note of more farcical fun, and his satire seems seldom less jovial than the song put into the mouth of a character in _Crotchet Castle_:

After careful meditation
And profound deliberation
On the various petty projects that have just been shown,
Not a scheme in agitation
For the world’s amelioration
Has a grain of common-sense in it, except my own!

Higher up on the bank comes the church core of Shepperton; then Shepperton Lock is higher still, opposite the Thames end of Weybridge. The village seems to have shifted its centre of gravity towards the station and Shepperton Green, which stand further back, but best known to strangers are the riverside inns and boathouses. To the right of a road cutting across to Laleham by Shepperton Green lies the small parish of Littleton, making perhaps the prettiest spot in this district, with its ancient Church and timbered park, which once enclosed a celebrated mansion destroyed by fire. This backwater of woodland, shading surely the tiniest of Britain’s Exe or Esk streams, is pleasantly reached by a field-path from the end of Chertsey Bridge; then the road by Littleton goes on to less taking scenes about Feltham or Ashford.

At Shepperton Lock the tow-path crosses from the Surrey side, and henceforth one can walk along the Middlesex bank, access to which has hitherto been precarious. Truth to tell, one thus gains little beyond a prospect of the stream flowing quietly between broad meadows, its bends making an idle round off the straight road, by which little more than a mile brings the cyclist from Shepperton to Chertsey Bridge. The green flats have a beauty of quiet amplitude, which is at least a change after Richmond’s manifold prospects and the tangled groves of Hampton; and here a fine background is formed by the pine-bristled heights of Surrey, edging the arena in which the Wey meets the Thames. William Black’s rhapsodical pen can make no more of this scenery than “a peaceful landscape, very English-looking; in the distance there was a low line of wooded hill, with here and there a church spire appearing among the trees.” A thunderstorm would get a good stage here, as did Mr. Wells’s Martian giants when they came stalking across from Byfleet.

Beyond Chertsey Bridge the tow-path is joined by a road that leads on along the wall of Lord Lucan’s Park to Laleham Ferry, opposite the site of that once renowned Chertsey Abbey. The pretty village of Laleham, with its much-patched church, is notable as the home where Dr. Arnold took pupils in his early life. Matthew Arnold was born here, and is buried, beside other members of the family, in the churchyard to which his heart and his father’s always turned fondly.

Love lends life a little grace,
A few sad smiles, and then
Both are laid in one cold place.

The Rugby head master had to wrench himself away from Laleham, where, indeed, his special admiration was called forth on the Surrey side by the striking contrast of heath scenery mingling with rich valley lands. He could no longer rejoice in the bank up to Staines as a walk “which, though it be perfectly flat, has yet a great charm from its entire loneliness, there being not a house anywhere near it; and the river here has none of that stir of boats and barges upon it which makes it in many places as public as the highroad.” Nowadays one must search far up the Thames for an unstirred reach.

Arnold’s roomy house has vanished, and the quiet amenities of Laleham seem threatened by architecture of another school, though it stands a good two miles from either Shepperton or Staines station. But the builder is hardly needed to populate the river banks in summer, as we see after crossing the neck of Penton Hook, a most childish vagary of a mile or so in which hoary Father Thames thinks fit to indulge himself so far on in his career. This loop, on the Surrey side, is buckled by an extraordinary gathering of bungalows, house-boats, tents, and shanties that give airy and watery shelter to an encampment of respectable gipsies from London, a sort of amphibious picnic life come into favour in late years. Past this, the tow-path brings us round to the more permanent riverside quarters of Staines, reached, as usual, less deviously and pleasantly by a flat, straight road.

Staines is one of the oldest towns in Middlesex, here or hereabouts appearing to have stood the Roman station _Ad Pontes_, by which the road to Silchester and Bath crossed the river. The whole vicinity has been found rich in Roman remains. The original town lies about its parish church in the valley of the Colne, that works its mills; but the floods of this sluggish delta have washed a later growth to the east, and it shows a new red church on the Thames bank, where a terrace of dignity looks across to the boathouses lining the Surrey side. A meaner quarter straggles on to the dull flats of Staines Moor behind the railway, from which High Street curves spaciously down to the bridge, for long the nearest neighbour of London Bridge. In our great-grandfathers’ day Staines Bridge was crossed by some three dozen coaches daily; and who can count the myriad wheels that now make this short straight cut through Middlesex into Surrey!

Near its bridge stands what is taken for the town’s godfather, London Stone, marking from times immemorial the limit of the City’s jurisdiction up the Thames, as ascertained and asserted by repeated visits of the Lord Mayor and Corporation, which seem now to have fallen into abeyance. Here I would call up the spirit of Matthew Arnold to rebuke for me that young lion of the _Daily Telegraph_ who, in criticizing my book on _Surrey_, growled at its mention of a notable Lord Mayor’s progress nearly three generations ago as made to Staines, and not rather to Oxford. For once a critic is wrong: the goal of the official journey was Staines, the circumgression to Oxford being tacked on as an after-thought, or piece of by-play. Even thus let me conclude this chapter with an excursus further up the river, to justify my accuracy by giving a faithful account of that Thames _Anabasis_ that might have been forgotten but for the reverend Xenophon--his Lordship’s chaplain, to wit--who enshrined the record in a leaden volume, now worth its weight in silver.

The civic fathers, we are told, having resolved to assert the City’s prerogative at Staines, were tempted by an invitation to connect with that time-honoured ceremony a pleasure-trip to Oxford. To Oxford, then, the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress travelled by land, and the first part of the chronicle is taken up in describing most minutely the circumstances of this extra jaunt. A whole page goes to the start, including a description of the coachman’s countenance, “reserved and thoughtful” as became his important charge, and the “four high-spirited and stately horses” which, “having been allowed a previous day of unbroken rest, ... chafed and champed exceedingly on the bits by which their impetuosity was restrained.” But the murmurs of the admiring crowd were “at length hushed by the opening of the hall door”; then, “as soon as the female attendant of the Lady Mayoress had taken her seat, dressed with becoming neatness, at the side of the well-looking coachman, the carriage drove away--not, however, with that violent and extreme rapidity which rather astounds than gratifies the beholders, but at that steady and majestic pace which is always an indication of real greatness.” The chaplain, our author, was of the party, though he modestly keeps himself in a back seat. Thus he can assure us that the roads were “in excellent order, and that the whole face of creation gleamed with joy.” It is not every day that creation sees an actual Lord Mayor faring forth over Middlesex roads.

At Hounslow a powder-mill happened to blow up, as if to salute the passage of the City potentate; but without further excitement he reached Oxford, joined there by several Aldermen and officials, who were forthwith entertained by the local municipality, while “it must here be mentioned that the Lady Mayoress and other ladies of the party, to the number of eight, ordered dinner at the ‘Star,’ and spent the evening in their own society.” But let us pass over a long account of the illustrious strangers being fêted, lionized and addressed by Town and Gown, and come to that great day, Thursday, July 27, 1826, when the City Barge, having taken nearly a week to make the upward voyage, lay in waiting by the banks of Christ Church meadow, with its ten splendid scarlet silk banners waving gently in the rising sun, beside the shallop of the Thames Navigation Committee and another large boat, in which came his lordship’s Yeomen of the Household, together with that most important functionary the cook, “who was at the time of embarkation busily engaged in preparing a fire in a grate fixed in the bow of the boat.” So at last, “amidst shouts of reiterated applause from the surrounding multitudes, the City Barge, manned by the City watermen in scarlet liveries, and all the other boats in attendance on his lordship, were simultaneously launched on the broad bosom of the princely Thames”--a sight not to be seen by this degenerate age unless on the front page of its _Illustrated London News_.

Punch was not such a rare show in the country as a live Lord Mayor. Crowds of people on the tow-path escorted the procession from Oxford; then every town and village near the banks furnished a new contingent of eager spectators. “Distant shouts of acclamation perpetually re-echoed from field to field, as the various rustic parties, with their fresh and blooming faces, were seen hurrying forth from their cottages and gardens, climbing trees, struggling through copses, and traversing thickets to make their shortest way to the water side.” No wonder the children ran, for the Lord Mayor and Mr. Alderman Atkins scattered handfuls of half-pence from their stately craft. At Caversham the condescension of true greatness was still more markedly exhibited in a moving incident recorded with long-drawn waggery, the gist of it being the picking out of a most uncouth and ludicrous-looking rustic mounted upon a “gaunt and rusty pony,” whom, flinging him a piece of money, his Lordship overwhelmed with the honour of a commission to ride on to Reading as his _avant-courier_.

Having started from Oxford at seven, the convoy reached Reading when “the sun had whirled down his broad disk into the west; and the evening twilight just served to show obscurely the tranquil stream of water over which the vessel glided, and the shapeless forms of country by which it was surrounded.” Here the voyagers spent the night at the “Bear Inn,” re-embarking next morning amid the ringing of bells and the firing of guns, not to speak of a band of music now taken on board. They dined at Clieveden, which prompts the author to a homily on the shortcomings of Dryden’s Buckingham, balanced by a seven-page eulogium on the virtues of the late George III. The local gentry and officials did not fail to pay their respects to the passing Admiral of the Thames, and were invited on board “with all the usual forms of politeness.” As we have seen, the distinguished tourists occasionally indulged themselves in mild jocosity; but on the whole their mood was one of becoming admiration, and their chaplain can assure us that “no recourse was had in any single instance throughout the voyage either to cards or dice, or to any other of those frivolous expedients to which the evening hours of life are sacrificed.”

The next night was spent at Windsor, where some score of pages go to celebrate the Castle apartments in a true “God bless the Regent and the Duke of York!” spirit of British loyalty. Delayed till noon by sight-seeing, the procession then got afloat for Staines, and whereas, above Windsor, the state barge had almost stuck in the mud, it now made better way in deeper water, and “left a long, undulating track behind” as it passed beneath that royal abode, “lifting up its lordly pile as if to receive the prostrate homage of the surrounding country.”

Hitherto the voyage had been more of a pleasure jaunt, but at Staines came to be enacted the real business of this Lord Mayor’s show _in partibus_. Duly arrayed in their robes and emblems of office, to the music of national airs, amid multitudes of the surrounding inhabitants, our City fathers descended to the shore, and three times solemnly circumambulated their western landmark--let us trust in true course of the sun, though on that pagan feature of the rite its reverend chronicler is not explicit.

When the procession halted, the Lord Mayor took his station near
the City Boundary; and directed the City Sword to be placed on the
Stone, in token of his Lordship’s jurisdiction. It was also a part
of the ceremony--which, though important, is simple--that the City
Banner should wave over the Stone. At the request, therefore, of
the Lord Mayor, Lord Henry Beauclerk, a lad of very prepossessing
appearance, of the age of fourteen, dressed in naval uniform, and
brother to His Grace the Duke of St. Albans, mounted the Stone, and
held the City Banner during the performance of the ceremony. The
Lord Mayor now received a bottle of wine from one of the
attendants, and broke it, according to ancient custom, on the
Stone. The Water-Bailiff then handed his Lordship a glass of wine,
who drank, ‘May God preserve the City of London!’ In this he was
joined by the young nobleman and the assembled company. Orders were
then given that the following inscription should be engraven on the
pedestal which supported the Stone:

“The Right Honourable
WILLIAM VENABLES,
Lord Mayor of the City of London
and
Conservator of the River Thames,
Viewed the Western Boundary of the
City’s Jurisdiction on the said River,
Marked by the Ancient Stone
Raised upon this Pedestal,
Erected A.D. 1285,
On the 29th day of July, A.D. 1826.
_God preserve the City of London!_”

The Lord Mayor then scattered abroad some hundred newly-coined
sixpences, and after repeated cheering, returned on board the
barge.

We need not be surprised to hear that “at three o’clock the party sat down in the cabin of the State Barge to a cold collation; after which some speeches were made.” By half-past eight they landed at Richmond, where the carriages were in waiting, and the sunburned Gilpins “returned to their respective homes.” His lordship, it is recorded, reached the Mansion House “a few minutes before ten” on this Saturday night; but future ages are left to guess at what hour he went to bed. The worthy chaplain, long laid to deeper rest, would surely turn in his grave could he know how he had taken pains to put in a ludicrous light that truly august Corporation, worshipful up and down the river for a hundred miles, though its practical power be now in the farther-reaching hands of the Thames Conservancy.

IX

BEATING THE BOUNDS

Like that corporation party, both writer and reader might now go home, having reached the limit of their companionship. But one more ramble we may take, if not tired of each other. We have viewed Middlesex from its most familiar eminence, and we have radiated through it by its highroads from London. There remains to bind up our short wayfarings by perambulating the bounds of this little county, as some future Lord Mayor may be able to do from his state-balloon.

A barge will not serve us all the way here so well as a broomstick. On three sides Middlesex is enclosed by natural boundaries--the Thames on the south, the Lea on the east, and the Colne on the west. It is on the north side that the frontier becomes an arbitrary one, and, in fact, presents such a jagged outline as sometimes to suggest that whoever shore off this division of England must have been staggering from one tap of strong ale or mead to the next in any direction. A more creditable explanation refers such irregularity to spiritual rather than spirituous influences, the lands of two bishops, we are told, having thus dovetailed into each other in the days when bishops had power to bind and loose on earth. Here it must be no trivial sport to beat the parish bounds--on the outside coincident with those of the county--as to which the oldest inhabitant could perhaps tell us how they were literally beaten into his memory in boyhood by blows or stripes administered at this or that spot, a custom that still may linger in playful survivals. What the oldest inhabitant will not know is that the rough custom of his youth seems to have been an attenuated form of bloodier sacrifices, which went more than skin deep in the propitiation of invisible spirits of term and boundary.

Something of the same irregularity, indeed, we find on beginning to trace the Middlesex bounds from Staines, above which they wander for a few miles as if confused among the delta of branches in which the Colne reaches the Thames. The main stream, to which Ordnance Survey maps grant the title, is that one crawling into Staines by the east side of the Great Northern Railway branch from Uxbridge. Here the boundary has bent a mile or two westwards, at one point touching the Colne Brook, as the branch is called that, from the village of this name, straggles down to the Thames opposite Egham. A pool in the Thames used to bear the nickname of “Colnbrook Churchyard,” the point of the grim jest being that this frontier village had no churchyard, and that the robbers who infested the surrounding moors were in the way of flinging the bodies of their victims into the river. “Moorish” is Spenser’s epithet for the Colne, moor in this part of Britain having commonly implied marshy rather than heathy ground; and behind Staines we get on an unlovely river flat still bearing the name of Staines Moor. But if we incline to hurry away from the Colne as sluggish and defiled by industries, let us remember how dear its waters were to Milton, whose home in youth was at Horton on the Bucks side, whence he had choice of wanderings among

“Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and river wide.”

From Colnbrook the boundary bends back towards the Colne River, with which it presently falls in along the reach from Yiewsley to Uxbridge, where this stream skirmishes out on the western flank of the canal’s straighter march. On the Middlesex side, here, the world is too much with us, and we must not be tempted over to the woods and heaths of Iver, in Bucks. So let us hasten up the canal bank to Uxbridge, where the border takes a crook to the east along a stream known as the Shire Ditch, then, recrossing the canal, once more follows the river as far as the county’s north-western corner.

This upper half of the western boundary is more picturesque than the flats below. Now the Colne runs through a real valley, shut in to the east by a ridge of high ground, looking over to the Bucks village of Denham, and other spots known to artists as well as to anglers. The ridge itself, which a road mounts by the shrunken bounds of Uxbridge Common, has several points both of beauty and interest. Over it for nearly half a dozen miles extends the name of Harefield, associated with that of the Newdigate family, which has such a good chance of fame through their annual _vates sacer_ at Oxford. One of them chose an “Adam Bede” for land agent, whose daughter would widely renown, under an _alias_, their Warwickshire seat, at which George Eliot had glimpses of squirely life. Another of the Newdigates was well known to our grandfathers as a Parliamentary Protestant champion. Their modern mansion, Harefield Place, comes a couple of miles above Uxbridge, built here to replace the old house, two or three miles further on, that had been destroyed by fire. This was the seat of the Countess of Derby for whom Milton wrote his Arcades, and whose tomb is the most sumptuous of those ornamenting Harefield Church.

On the wooded bank behind the church the site of that defunct home is picturesquely marked by a group of ponds and grand old trees. By what seems to have been once an avenue, a path slopes on up the bank to Breakspear, a still flourishing mansion, beautifully embowered, notable because this manor is said to have belonged to the family of the one English Pope, Adrian IV. Some few years ago, when a Catholic chapel was being consecrated in the neighbourhood, the mason brought duly to wall up the relics in its altar turned out to bear the name of Nicholas Breakspear. At a social function which followed there was naturally some talk of such a coincidence, and an inconsiderate Catholic suggested that the man must be a descendant of his great namesake. “Don’t be taking away a Pope’s character!” cried one jovial Irish priest; to which another made response: “Faith! and it’s no character he had to lose after selling us to the English.” This Pope, who gave Henry II. a title to Ireland in consideration of the payment of Peter’s pence, has been also claimed as a Hertford man; but if Breakspear were his cradle, it stands a good mile within the Middlesex border, about as far to the west of Ruislip reservoir.

Harefield Church, with its show of monuments, lies below its village, beyond which, on the road to Rickmansworth, we come to Harefield Park and Harefield Grove, or, descending into the river valley, we should find a Harefield Moor and a Harefield Wharf on the canal. Harefield is as yet a real country village with quiet inns and roomy green, but ominous placards hold out a threat of “villa residences.” Nothing, indeed, could at present be more unsuburban than the byroad which, at the school-house, turns off along Harefield Park and by the hamlet of Hillend, to wind shadily with westward bends till it drops steeply to the canal, where a huge quarry has uncovered a chalk bank contrasting with variegated disclosures. For at this corner, as at one other, Middlesex shows its age in gouty knuckles of chalk as well as wrinkles of sand.

To reach the extreme north-western nook of the county we must now leave the ridge, to hold for a mile across the flat on which, alongside that cart-horse canal, the Colne goes frisking and sliding in wayward channels, by whose clear shallows the Miltons of to-day must beware how they come angling after poetic images, as these are preserves for the “True Waltonians” of Rickmansworth. At the ford on the further branch, near the village of Mill End, we reach the border-line, which has been kept in view west of the parallel ridge; but now it turns eastward, making a dip to the south as it crosses the river flat, then soon mounting to green bastions moated by the canal.

On this northern side it is that we may find it hard to know at any point whether we are in Middlesex or in Herts. The line runs over high ground a couple of miles south of Rickmansworth, passing between Harefield Grove and Bishop’s Wood, then turning north along the road to Batchworth Heath, that brings us past a large new consumptive hospital, testimony to the airiness of this plateau, more than 300 feet above the sea. The woods on either hand, with their sand-banks and pine-clumps, are jealously fortified by wire and placards; but part of the heath is still open, where we come to the gates of Moor Park, looking over such a fine view southward and eastward. The border-line here passes through the garden of the “Prince of Wales,” crosses the highroad mounting up from Northwood, then for a little is roughly represented by the byroad which drops from the Moor Park gates, making towards a height crowned by the Oxhey Woods; but soon it bends back from this road, and to touch it again we must take a path along the Metropolitan line, beside which we should find it marked by a funereal obelisk, that seems a monument to the rural charms of Northwood, here bleeding to death in red-brick villas. A more prosaic explanation of such landmarks is as showing the limits of the Port of London coal-tax, abolished in our time; but, like the Father of History, I repeat this as told me, not as matter of faith.

From Northwood the border runs on to the bottom of the Oxhey woods, thence trending northwards across the London and North Western line a mile beyond Pinner Station, and keeping a little to the west of Grim’s Dyke, as it mounts on to Harrow Weald Common, and from that to the highest point of Middlesex at the edge of Bushey Heath. Its course now is on the north-west side of Stanmore Common, to touch the Aldenham reservoir, whence it ascends to Elstree, over a sweep of high ground giving fine glimpses on either side, though I cannot make out from what point, hereabouts, Defoe could have had the extensive prospect which set his foreign companions exclaiming that England was all a garden.

They had there on the right Hand, the Town of St. _Albans_ in their
View; and all the Spaces between, and further beyond it, look’d
indeed like a Garden. The enclos’d Corn-Fields made one grand
Parterre, the thick planted Hedge Rows, like a Wilderness or
Labyrinth, divided in _Espaliers_, the Villages interspers’d,
look’d like so many several Noble Seats of Gentlemen at a Distance.
In a Word it was all Nature, and yet look’d all like Art; on the
left Hand we see the West-End of _London_, _Westminster-Abbey_ and
the _Parliament-House_, but the Body of the City was cut off by the
Hill, at which _Hampstead_ intercepted the Sight on that side. More
to the South we had _Hampton Court_ and S. W. _Windsor_, and
between both, all those most Beautiful Parts of _Middlesex_ and
_Surrey_, on the Bank of the Thames, of which I have already said
so much.

From Elstree the border-line closely follows the road to Barnet as far as the hamlet of Barnet Gate, where it turns south-east for its most extraordinary vagaries. Holding straight on by the road north-eastward, in little more than a mile we should strike it again across the mouth of that inlet, miles deep, by which Herts flows into Middlesex about the Great North Road. A little below Barnet Gate the line bends southward towards Highwood, then again eastward in the dip between Totteridge and Mill Hill, so as to bring the former ridge into Herts. On the road mounting it, the boundary is marked by a half-buried post, economically abbreviating our county’s style as D.D.X. I stray only some few hundred yards from my diocese in pointing out the beautiful walk along this ridge--a long mile of broad-swarded road, or stretched-out common, bordered by ponds, farms, cottage gardens and trees, through which one gets fine glimpses of Barnet to the north and Mill Hill to the south. Then comes the village and its Church, opposite which Copped Hall was at one time occupied by Bulwer Lytton; Cardinal Manning, Richard Baxter, and Lady Rachael Russell being other names connected with this pretty place, only a little blighted as yet by the suburban builder. Further on, at the “Orange Tree,” opens the cottage-bordered green, an unusually long one, from the foot of which run most rustic paths that would soon bring us back into Middlesex, as does Totteridge Lane, holding eastward across the Barnet line to Whetstone.

For here the eccentric boundary, after attaining its “furthest south” near Woodside Park station, has taken another bend north beside the Dollis Brook, so as to stretch out a tongue of Middlesex for some two miles along the Great North Road, across which it strikes, then again turns south by the Great Northern Railway, till it ends its maddest deviation in this direction near Colney Hatch Asylum, only about eight miles from the Thames. Crossing the railway beyond New Southgate station, and walking on eastwards to the next cross roads, one reaches the invisible head of this crook in a field still open to the north. The boundary stones having disappeared, the exact run of the line, by a few feet, is at present in question, a dispute of some consequence upon ground now “ripe” for the builder, since building regulations differ in the two counties.

Now, as if scared from the thickening suburbs, it turns back north to enclose Southgate and Winchmore Hill in Middlesex, leaving the Barnets in Herts with the valley of the Pymmes Brook, here tripping like a younker and a prodigal, yet after a few miles more to creep so lamely into the Lea over Tottenham Marshes. At Cock Fosters the wilful line takes a westward course along Hadley Common, at the further end of which it wanders round the outskirts of High Barnet, so as to fall in again with the road from Elstree; but soon it starts off on a fresh northward tack along the county’s north-eastern headland. It would now seem to be tired of freakish tricks, and in the woods below North Mimms it bends eastward to run pretty steadily on between Potter’s Bar and Northaw, beside the first stage of the road to Enfield, then a little to the north of White Webbs Park, by the south side of Theobald’s Park, across the New River and the high-road entering Waltham Cross, a mile beyond which it is brought up with a round turn by the Lea.

The sluggish crooks of the Lea make the county’s eastern boundary. But alas for that once idyllic river, loved and lost by gentle piscators! Amateurs of Dutch scenery might here and there find a bit to their taste; and the Essex bank has heights that show to more advantage over Middlesex flats, where one sees how this lower course of the Lea has been fouled into a dull Lethe, suggesting few poetical images, unless those of Browning’s “Childe Roland to the dark tower came.” Its meadows, on which nowadays one will hardly find a “milkmaid singing like a nightingale,” or “young Corydon, the shepherd, playing purely on his oaten pipe,” are more fitly described as marshes; and the wandering and branching stream is drained into the Lea Navigation, in part coinciding with the river’s course, but more often holding aloof from it like a prosperous and prosaic citizen from some ne’er-do-well idler of the family.

Not that it is altogether idle, indeed, for as it creeps and twists to its slimy mouth behind the forlorn Isle of Dogs, “the wanton Lea” has been pressed into the service of London’s water-supply, stored and well filtered, let us hope. Reservoir embankments ill adorn the river scenery; nor does a new pea-green swimming-bath excite such curiosity as did a towering pile of faggots or brushwood, once used as rifle-butts, that made a landmark of Tottenham Marshes till the other day it lit them up in its moment of glory as a gigantic bonfire. The cheerfullest sight here is the football scrimmages of would-be Hotspurs, played on gateless flats. The creeks and channels of the river-bed are still frequented by local Izaak Waltons, in whose breasts springs eternal hope of roach or dace. Very hot weather tempts venturesome youth to bathe in the Stygian stream. The sophisticated main channel is ploughed by crews of athletic East Enders who have little need to be admonished, “Eyes in the boat!” This river was once capable of more serious navigation, if we may trust the legend that a fleet of Danes sailed up it for twenty miles, settling themselves in a camp from which Alfred diverted the stream, and set on the bold Londoners to make havoc of that stranded fleet, so that, in Drayton’s verse, “old Lea brags of the Danish blood.”

We are here skirting close to the high-road by which we came out through Edmonton. “But I now see Tottenham Cross, and our short walk hither shall put a period to my too long discourse.” It is as well we are not bound to enter the County of London, since there the Lea would bring us to Hackney Marsh, perhaps the most unlovely spot of Middlesex soil--one which some examiners, indeed, might propose to bracket with Staines Moor, that at least deserves a _proxime accessit_.

Such blotches, however, are exceptional, and between those dismal flats on the most distant edges of the county so recklessly libelled as “all ugly,” it has been shown how one can find much pleasant and not a little charming scenery of a truly English type. If a jury of my fellow-countymen and gentle readers be not now ready to give a verdict of slander against Cobbett, let them go forth to examine with their own eyes the evidence on which I have been able faithfully to discharge my duty as advocate for Middlesex.

“To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new!”

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

the the Alexandra Palace=> the Alexandra Palace {pg 44}

cotninuing the Green Lanes=> continuing the Green Lanes {pg 71}

surburban avenues=> suburban avenues {pg 106}