TO not every Londoner of this generation is the Great North Road as well known even by name as the Great Northern Railway running near it. The highway that led so many a hopeful youth across the northern heights, to see the lights of London at last shining before him, has more than once shifted its course, and now falls into the Metropolis by a delta of branches, among which one might be at a loss to pick out the main stream. Its original course seems to have been by Hornsey, Muswell Hill, Colney Hatch, and Friern Barnet, where it may still be followed as a pleasant byway of winding ups and downs joining the present road at Whetstone. That chain of muddy, rutty lanes, as it was in old days, becoming worn out by traffic, the Bishops of London, through whose land it passed, made a new road straight over Highgate Hill. Those spiritual stepfathers were more concerned about collecting their tolls than sparing horseflesh; but, as Bishops ceased to be great lords, both clergymen and laymen began to have a conscience of what is due to animals. Proposals to divert the road round this trying steep were for a time baffled by the opposition of landowners holding jealously to their parked seclusion. Not till about a century ago was constructed the road which skirts Highgate Hill on the east, at first meant to be carried out through a tunnel on a smaller scale, like the grotto leading from Naples to Pozzuoli. The tunnel, however, fell in before it was opened, and gave place to a deep cutting spanned by the archway on which Hornsey Lane crosses it, a structure recently rebuilt. This Archway Road, as it is called, may claim to be the main northern highway. But motorists and cyclists from the West End are much more familiar with the Finchley Road that, passing on the other side of Hampstead Heath, converges with the eastern line at North Finchley.

Finchley is a very wide word, as I can tell, who, while yet a stranger to Middlesex, paying a visit here, found myself let in for a dark walk of over half a dozen miles to the Finchley Road Station. Even further this parish spreads along the lower heights beyond Hampstead and Highgate, including dependencies with by-names of their own. Till enclosed early in last century, it contained much open land, like that Finchley Common famed in Hogarth’s picture and in the Newgate Calendar; Sydney Smith calls it the most notorious haunt of highwaymen in England when he was young, as Tom Jones and Partridge had reason to understand. A rough patch of it still holds out on the right hand of the eastern road, but hardly large enough to parade a regiment of the Guards, or to

afford a stage for any thrilling chase of Dick Turpin or Jack Sheppard. The airy high ground once used for military encampments is now set with strings and knots of houses, grouping themselves most thickly at three points—Church End, East Finchley, and North Finchley—the last-named being the apex of the triangle they form, and the first the nucleus of the parish.

Between these straggling suburbs are still green fields, groves of elm and beech, and footway hints of vanishing rusticity; while much of the ground has been taken up by huge cemeteries on the heights once clearly outside of London. Electric trams and motor-buses seem at present in need of a good word, which they might have from anyone who had seen the Great North Road before its tram-line was made. Two or three years ago a pitiable sight here on hot Sunday afternoons was groups of flower-burdened women in black, waiting to struggle for room on the insufficient public vehicles that tugged heavy loads towards the resting-places of their dead. Where so many sad and weary mourners were often disappointed of a lift, tramcars from Holloway now spin by the gates of the adjacent Islington and St. Pancras burying-grounds. The Finchley Road is not yet laid with rails; but up it steer a fleet of motor-buses that have their haven at the “Swan and Pyramids” in North Finchley, some of them voyaging southwards as far as the distant “Elephant and Castle.”

The Finchley Road emerges into open country at Child’s Hill, just beyond the London boundary. Further back, indeed, near the cemetery at Fortune Green to the left of the road, there is a most rustic-looking farm and a fine old avenue, making the first stage of a field-way to Hendon, soon spoiled by a sewage farm and an isolation hospital, but recovering from this infection when it has crossed the Brent. The road to Hendon turns left from the highway through the village and string of villas called Golder’s Green, a name that takes in the red-brick tower on the right, marking the new Golder’s Green Crematorium, beside a Jewish cemetery, five miles from the Marble Arch. The tube railway passing under Hampstead Hill now threatens to break up this pleasant stretch of the road, where at present lanes and paths run off to Hendon and the Brent Valley. So London stretches its tentacles towards Hendon, as yet swimming freely on its sea of green bounded by the Finchley and the Edgware Road, from which latter we shall visit it further on.

From the hamlet of Temple Fortune, with its “Royal Oak” bus station, where a rash suburb seems to have budded too early, the road, again as yet between hedges, mounts for a long mile to Finchley’s Church End and G.N. Railway-station. Here, nearly six miles from Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Finchley Road behoves to be known as the Regent’s Park Road. The little Church, containing some old brasses, stands to the left on a road coming in from Hendon, where it has been rather dwarfed by Christ’s College opposite, once a semi-private school, now acquired by the local authorities. In the pleasant churchyard the most noticeable tomb is an obelisk over Major Cartwright, that firebrand of Radical reform in his day, who in ours, perhaps, might pass for a cautious Conservative.

Church End has still some traces of its village life; but most of Finchley is a suburb of too monotonous respectability, now overshadowing our road for a couple of miles or more. On the west side it drops to the course of the Dollis Brook, the Brent’s longest stream, beyond which the swelling ground lies still open in meadows or parks, with green lanes and footpaths leading over to the ridges of Mill Hill and Totteridge. From Nether Street, for instance—the valley road parallel with the highway—by a lodge gate is marked an avenued footway for Mill Hill, that leads finely across the Dollis Brook to mount on a golf-course beside the grounds of Nether Court. It seems as if all the parks of Middlesex are like to be usurped upon by that greedy game of golf, so much more at ease in its native barrens, or on the heaths of Surrey. There may soon be as many clubs of Londoners as in all Scotland; and yet a bitter cry goes up from long waiting-lists of would-be members, eager to find room on links of any pretensions. Of such a candidate it is told that, in his impatience, he addressed the secretary, asking whether his admission were barred by social ineligibility or by want of “form,” and received on a postcard the curt reply, Both. But if we drop into golf stories, our progress along the North Road will be bunkered; so from this hint of an attractive deviation let us return to its macadam. The word is “Fore!”

At Tally-Ho Corner, about a mile beyond Church End, the Finchley Road converges with the main highway coming by the “Bald Faced Stag” of East Finchley, with cemeteries and other prospects on its right. Past the seven-mile-stone there is an ascent to the turning for Colney Hatch at Fallow Corner, where the top of tramcars gives a wide view towards the Alexandra Palace. To the right here lies some pleasant scenery about the great asylum of Colney Hatch, name worthy of a better fame, which its conscious dwellers would fain dissemble under the undimmed title of New Southgate. But, on the whole, this makes a less pleasing way than the other.

From North Finchley the united roads run on another long mile between houses, a remarkable number of them public-houses and other places of refreshment. Thus we pass imperceptibly into Whetstone, where comes in Friern Lane from Muswell Hill, by Colney Hatch and Friern Barnet, which is the oldest and prettiest, but not now the busiest, way out of North London. By-roads and paths go off on this side, over the Great Northern main line, towards Southgate and East Barnet. On the other side, where runs the branch line to High Barnet, one can soon strike across to the quiet amenities of Totteridge; and from Totteridge station, close to the highroad, a path leads on up the Dollis Brook to High Barnet. But when the road itself brings us again into something like open country, it passes for a time out of Middlesex, its boundary here so labyrinthine that one has known a very policeman doubtful as to which county he was patrolling. Between Totteridge and Barnet a long forked tongue of Hertfordshire is thrust into Middlesex, licking up some of the fairest scenes hereabouts for a county that has no need to be greedy of loveliness. It is thus that our shire’s waist becomes pinched up to a breadth of about eight miles, between Colney Hatch and the Thames. The North Road crosses the border more than a mile short of High Barnet, where for a time the tramway stopped at the top of a hill, as if taking breath to mount the steeper rise into the town, in the upper part of which we come back into Middlesex. On this ascent into Barnet, by its railway station, almost for the first time we get on either hand wide and open views of the fine landscapes that have been too much butchered to make London homes and holidays.

Barnet is another widespread name. Friern Barnet—Friar’s Barnet—was site of a monastery, now two or three miles behind us to the east of our road. A mile or two north of this lies East Barnet, with its suburban outgrowth, Oakleigh Park. Modest as East Barnet looks, its secluded old Church seems to have been the core of all the Barnets. A little way further north, on the main line of the Great Northern Railway, New Barnet has become a distant Metropolitan suburb overlaying the hamlet of Lyonsdown. Then, a mile to the west, eleven miles from Clerkenwell, Chipping Barnet—i.e., Cheaping or Market Barnet—answering to the alias of High Barnet by its elevation of 400 feet, still shows character as an old independent town, especially about the far-seen tower and spirelet of its restored church, on the brow of the ridge. Here goes off westward an airy road to Elstree, leading in a couple of miles by Arkley to Barnet Gate, a mere hamlet about an old windmill and an inn, from which a very rural footpath edges a by-road to Highwood and Mill Hill.

Towards the parallel ridge of Totteridge, building is transforming Arkley Common, where were the once-sought Barnet Wells, visited by Pepys in 1667, who “there found many people a-drinking”; but half a century later Defoe records how the credit of this spa had dried up, the more accessible waters of Hampstead and Islington having come into vogue. Till the present day Barnet has kept the notoriety of its fair in September, the trade of which is drowned in a carnival of blended Cockney rascality and bucolic dissipation, so that it seems time to put down this blatant survival from when the town was practically as far off London as York is now. It will be remembered that at Barnet Oliver Twist fell in with that compromising companion, the “Artful Dodger,” who, at the fair time, was likely enough to have business here. Dickens is said to have had Barnet again in view as “Thistledown,” at which he denounced the mismanagement of a “Free” Grammar School, such as in his day so often gave cause for scandal. But unless that the way to it led up a hill, where on either side the fields were “puffed up into notice by a series of undulations,” his description as little answers to the Barnet of our day as to its rebuilt and reformed school beside the Church. The town enjoys several charitable foundations, from the seventeenth-century Jesus Hospital, designed for such old women as are not sorcerers, witches, tale-bearers, back-biters, drunkards, lunatics or otherwise objectionable, to the modern Leathersellers’ Almshouses on the Elstree road. Its “Red Lion,” “Green Man,” and other ancient hostelries are further hints of a prosperity fed by the traffic of the Great North Road, which here throws off a hardly less-renowned branch to Holyhead.

Barnet is famed in history for the battle, 1471, where, as an old schoolmaster of mine puts it in a well-known school history, “every petal of the Red Rose was shattered from its stem”—a botanical metaphor to puzzle unimaginative schoolboys, who perhaps know more of this battle from Bulwer Lytton’s Last of the Barons. Running on through the cheerful High Street, and by the common called Hadley Green, our road forks for St. Albans and for Hatfield at a triangular patch of grass on which an obelisk marks the traditional scene of Warwick’s death. The battle-field seems to have been mainly to the right of the road, on Hadley Common, to which one turns off from the upper corner of Hadley Green, where the town almost runs into the village of Monken Hadley, with its ancient Church. As a rarer relic than its monuments, this restored, or rather rebuilt, church keeps on its tower a cresset that may often have served for beacon to wanderers in the wilds of Enfield Chase, and no doubt did its part in spreading the alarm of the Armada, for at Hadley we are on one of the highest levels of Middlesex, in view of “bleak Hampstead’s swarthy moor,” where Macaulay starts the chain of fire-signals that would run to the north till “the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of Carlisle.” Close to the church will be seen the railed-in stump of an oak, haunted by misty memories of one Friar Bungay, whom Bulwer Lytton makes to figure in his story; but this personage seems to have lived more than a century earlier, and to have shared the fate of Roger Bacon as being dubbed a sorcerer, through scientific curiosity in advance of their age. For an elm not far off is cherished a tradition of Latimer’s preaching under it; and if so, it must be a very patriarch of elms.

Hadley Common, Barnet’s most beautiful purlieu, is the largest unenclosed fragment of Enfield Chase, a strip of woodland, interspersed with greensward, stretching for two miles along the ridge north-east of the town, all whose sweetheart couples might be lost in its bosky mazes. One can thread them by taking the road turning off at that venerable stump, to become a bridle-track along the edge of the woods, joined about half-way by a path coming up from New Barnet Station. This way is sacred to the pedestrian, though the cyclist is tolerated, if he care to plough through the roughness of its further end. It debouches at Cock Fosters, now a pretty hamlet of gentility about the inn which was once, no doubt, a resort of foresters, standing just off the road from Southgate to Potter’s Bar.

As hitherto he has seen so little of the country from closed-in highroads, the reader who has got to High Barnet on wheels might be glad to take his way homewards by a roundabout track that, safe from the proud dust of motor-cars, makes one of the greenest walks so near London, with fine prospects on all the Barnets. His first stage is along Hadley Common to Cock Fosters; then, by the spire of the church behind the inn, he will find a footpath which, crossing a road enters Oak Hill Park and drops over the Pymmes Brook to a road past the isolated church of East Barnet. At the Manor House here James Thomson is said to have been tutor, and he might still find scenes for the rural pictures of his Seasons, preserved by private grounds on the slopes opposite this church, half hidden in its shady enclosure. Behind it the Church Farm has been turned into the Philanthropic Society’s Industrial School, by which goes a path that, beyond the Great Northern Railway main line, soon loses itself in the new roads of Oakleigh Park, leading into the highway at Whetstone. Perhaps a pleasanter way, as things are now, is to keep the road past the church till on its right runs up an embowered lane straggling across the railway into a road from Colney Hatch, on which one turns right for the tram-line. This round of some five miles from Barnet takes one roughly along the edge of that inlet of Hertfordshire, that, indeed, extends to Colney Hatch, a mile or two further south. Almost opposite the “embowered lane” mentioned above, goes off a turn in the other direction, which, crossing the Pymmes Brook, mounts past the opening of a trim path to Southgate. But I fear to confuse my guidees in pointing out all the green ways still open on this side of the Great North Road here.

To return from our digression backwards: in the upper part of Barnet the Great North Road re-enters Middlesex to traverse its bluff north-eastern promontory. Here the road is a truly great one, well laid, well bordered, and well provided with guide posts giving not only directions, but distances on the by-ways. From the obelisk at the fork it skirts on the left Wrotham Park, the seat of the unlucky Admiral Byng, its woods hiding a white mansion that looks out conspicuously from the other side. To the right appears in a hollow the suburban smartness of Hadley Wood, a new quarter grown up about its station on the main Great Northern Railway line, which presently tunnels under our road. By Ganwick Corner and the “Duke of York,” we come to Potter’s Bar, the last Middlesex village, much transmogrified through villas and trim suburban roads, by which London breaks out again on the edge of its shire. This is three miles from Barnet, and five or six miles more through “pleasant Hertfordshire” would bring us to Hatfield, whence this road holds on by fat midlands, skirting fens and wolds, over fells and moors, through dales and glens, till at last it must be brought to a stand by the rushing tide of the Pentland Firth, after giving so many stages of scenery and adventure for imagination. I think it is Mr. John Buchan who insists how, among the world’s roads, the breath of romance blows stronger on those pointing to the Pole than on those belting the same latitude and hugging the same isobar.

The station of Potter’s Bar lies a mile or so to the left, reached by an avenue-like way opening nearly opposite the “Old Robin Hood.” This station also serves South Mimms, a goodly village with an old church, but not set in such rich surroundings as its neighbour, North Mimms, across the Hertford border. The direct way to South Mimms is the Holyhead Road, turning off from Barnet High Street at the “Green Man,” which is all that a highway should be; but not much more can be said of it unless for its peep into Dyrham Park at the Dancers Hill cross-roads. Above the thirteenth mile-stone and the crossing of the Mimms Brook the pedestrian may look out for a group of farm buildings on the left, by which a path, crossing the road here, curves over fields to Clare Hall and a hospital near the south end of North Mimms. There a lane to the left, or a path a little further, leads out of Middlesex to the hamlet of Ridge, through whose churchyard begins another field-path running after a mile almost into the picturesque Hertfordshire village of Shenley; then a park-enclosed road of two miles more leads to the Midland station of Radlett on Watling Street.

But one must not be tempted to stray into another county, else much might be said of the road that turns right at the Potter’s Bar Police Station for Northaw, Cheshunt, and Enfield. From Potter’s Bar, on this side, another finely-bordered highway turns back to London, through what was once Enfield Chase, by Cock Fosters and Southgate. At the leafy hollow, where a large board beacons to Hadley Wood Station, one can turn by it for a walk of two miles to Barnet, pleasantly reached over the upper part of Hadley Common.

The cross-road in the other direction leads in three miles to Enfield and the scenes of our next chapter, passing the north side of Trent Park, which got its exotic name from George III., when he gave a lease of it to Sir Richard Jebb, in reward for his services to one of the royal princes on a sick-bed at the Tyrolese Trent. Where the road touches the park, over the fence may be seen the remains of Camelot Moat, an overgrown enclosure of immemorial antiquity that makes one of the scenes in the Fortunes of Nigel. A later novelist may have picked up a hint here in the legend of such a “Lost Sir Massingberd” as is said to have hid himself in a hollow tree and perished miserably by falling into a well underneath. By the country-folk Camelot Moat seems best remembered as one of Dick Turpin’s lairs; but all over the county linger memories of this worthy, whose spirit on rough nights haunts its lonely roads from Enfield Chase to Stanmore Heath, or did so till quite recently, when it is understood to have taken offence at the passage of motor-cars as not easily brought to “stand and deliver.”