IT has been fondly held that Watling Street went out over Hampstead and Hendon, and the bit of the City bearing this name would fit in with such an opinion. But the sounder doctrine seems to be that the ancient way, made or improved as the Romans’ great North-Western Road, originally came up from the marshes at Westminster, where the name Horseferry Road tells a tale, and thence took the line of what is now Park Lane, till the building of London Bridge caused it to be diverted into the City. From the Marble Arch this route runs almost straight on to Edgware, and beyond, without much wavering, to the foot of the height on which stands St. Albans.

The Edgware Road is familiar to more Londoners than are aware of its antiquity. It is now too crowded with traffic to stir thoughts of bygone renown; but on one of the motor-buses that urge their wild career through Maida Vale and Kilburn, beyond Brondesbury making the arduous ascent of Shoot-Up Hill, a spur of the Hampstead heights, we can soon get out to the boundary of London County at Cricklewood. On the left hand of the road here a square mile or so of new suburb has sprung up in the last few years, the best part of it being on an estate of All Souls’ College, whose Fellows must fatten in the body, while less lucky gownsmen are like to starve on agricultural depression. It is well to own property at some “Creek in the Wood” so near London; but when my own three acres of pasturage come to be allotted I have my eye on the fields about St. Martin’s or St. Paul’s.

The east side of the road here belongs to the Metropolitan borough of Hampstead. On the west we are in the Middlesex urban district of Willesden, that huge hobbledehoy suburb that as yet in part bears much the same relation to London proper as lignite does to coal; or it may be said to be in process of solidification—“half-baked” is a vulgar epithet on censorious tongues. In the lifetime of a generation this district has increased its population more than sevenfold, while, not to be behind its neighbours, it has set up a debt of nearly a million pounds. The large parish originally consisted of several scattered hamlets—Kilburn, Brondesbury, Cricklewood, Willesden Green, Harlesden, and Church End—which have now run together, though with gaps still shrinking every month. The Kilburn end, indeed, has long been firmly welded on to Paddington. Beside Willesden Green Station may be seen a bit of the original green; but if thereon Willesden should affect “county” airs, let her look back to the fate of Lisson Green and Lisson Grove. Between Kensal Rise and the Public Library in Willesden High Road there is at present a deep, shaded hill lane, barred by a stile, where artists or poets might carry on their business undisturbed. In another year or two this will probably be overflowed from the adjacent brickworks, so as to become “Klondyke Avenue” or “Edward VII. Road.” Would that the builder had first swooped upon that dingy south-western edge, blighted by the smoke of engines and the language of bargees, where Browning may well have seen—

From the misnamed junction at Harlesden, the quarter of Willesden best known to railway travellers, there are still bits of footpath towards Church End, by Roundwood Park, swelling to an eminence that gives a good view of the neighbourhood. Willesden Church, standing in the remotest corner of the parish, had once a noted image of the Virgin, which brought many pilgrims to “Our Lady of Willesden”; and though it has suffered enlargement and restoration, it enshrines interesting monuments, brasses, and other relics of an antiquity that goes back to Norman times, beset by a show of later tombstones, among them that of Charles Reade the novelist.

The “Crown” at Cricklewood is the terminus of bus traffic on the high-road. Thence an electric tram, coming round from Willesden, spins out the straight road as far as Edgware, through a chequer of open spaces that are every day being filled up like a backgammon board. On this road we may well hurry at tramway speed, looking for interest rather to either hand of it. As soon as we get out of what a year or so ago was the edge of building, where on the right stands a forbidding fortress of the Midland Railway, on the other side Dollis Hill Lane is about to be overshadowed by Dollis Hill Avenue. This leafy lane leads along the brow of Dollis Hill to Neasden, passing a house of Lord Aberdeen’s, more than once visited by the statesman in honour of whom its sloping grounds, now a public play-place for Willesden, have been named the Gladstone Park. Mark Twain for a time occupied the house, which has a fine view over the north-western suburbs. The word Dollis, recurring in Middlesex place-names, has been held as connected with “dole,” an old word for a mark of sharing or partition, replaced in our Prayer Book by “neighbour’s landmark”; but this is not a point on which pundits are agreed, and in many cases such names, the popular etymology of which is generally wrong, might turn out to come from an owner long forgotten.

From the back of Dollis Hill a footpath leads down to the “Welsh Harp,” the next point of note on the road. This tavern flourishes on the edge of what is the largest lake in Middlesex, or indeed in South-Eastern England, the Kingsbury Reservoir, popularly known as the Welsh Harp Water, a sheet more than a mile long, formed by damming the waters of the Brent and the Silk Brook, as a store for supplying the Regent’s Canal. Fishing, boating, and skating make attractions for customers of the landlord, who in hard winters must coin ice into gold; and in summer there are the tea-garden dissipations of a popular Vauxhall. At the top, the artificial lake’s feeders are bridged by the road; at the bottom, the Brent is released from a dam not so large as that of the Nile at Assouan; then below, the once flowery banks of this stream seem as if blighted by the Metropolitan Railway works at Neasden.

Mr. Chadband might well rebuke the writer who should compare the Welsh Harp Water to Loch Katrine or Windermere; but there is some pretty scenery to be looked for about its lower end. One surprising feature here is Kingsbury Church, that, not 300 yards off a suburban road, stands among quiet meadows almost out of sight of any house. On a slight eminence, shaded by funereal evergreens set in a frame of hedgerow timber, its red roof makes a cheerful spot of colour, and the interior shows a refreshingly old-fashioned simplicity. So close to London, one might suppose it a secluded country church, but for the predominance of elegant tombstones betraying its congregation as no mere villagers. The original structure has been claimed as Anglo-Saxon. Some antiquarian spectacles make out here the site of a Roman camp; while there seems better reason to take this King’s burgh as the first Saxon settlement in Middlesex, in a sense the nucleus of modern London, when the place may have been more populous than it is to-day, but for its annexe Neasden. The

village of Kingsbury has drifted nearly a mile to the north, where it lies stranded about its “Green Man,” past which a by-way from Harrow leads into the Edgware Road at the hamlet called the Hyde. Hyde House Farm here, a little off the highway, is understood to have given a country retreat to Goldsmith, who is heard of as lodging at other points on the Edgware Road.

The mile or so’s breadth of country stretching two or three miles back from the Edgware Road, between Kingsbury and Harrow, makes an extraordinary vacuum in the teeming life of Greater London. For reasons based on a heavy clay soil, it does not lend itself to builders’ designs. Of late a few villas have straggled on to the lanes between Kingsbury and its lonely church; else few but scattered farm-buildings break this green expanse, a preserve of real rurality, traversed by lanes and hedgerow paths giving solitary ways across brooks and meadows, northward to Edgware, westward to Harrow, so little trodden that blackberries can grow ripe here within sound of the Metropolitan Railway whistles, and the plainest hint of London’s close neighbourhood is a crop of notices to trespassers. On the north side lurk two isolation hospitals; in the centre, towards Harrow, come the hamlets of Preston and Kenton; on the south, at the foot of a bold hill-swell towards Wembley, lie the buildings of Uxendon Farm, where poor Anthony Babington was captured to answer for his abortive conspiracy. Horseflesh seems to thrive on these fat pastures. Though Kingsbury Races have been well abolished, there are stud paddocks on the Wembley side, as well as great army stables near the Edgware Road; and it was somewhere hereabouts, if one be not mistaken, that Mr. Soapey Sponge came to equip himself for his sporting campaign.

The other side of the Edgware Road is far better populated, for, at the “New” Welsh Harp, above the “Old” one, it touches the growth of Hendon, stretching and straggling across almost to the Finchley Road. Our tram-line passes close to Hendon Station, a mile below the row of old almshouses where one turns aside to the Church of which Hampstead’s was once a chapelry. This, with its monuments of dignity, has the air of a true village church, and its shady churchyard overlooks green slopes. Beyond Church End comes a knot of lanes, bordered by new and old houses, one of which belonged to David Garrick. But elsewhere Hendon has grown too much “up to date,” and its outskirts are beset by huge piles of public buildings, among them the new newspaper depot of the British Museum Library. In the southern quarter, dropping to the Brent, one might think oneself back in London; while to the north greedy tongues of brick still stretch out over green fields, on which Anthony Trollope’s readers may remember how Polly Kneefit was wooed and won.

But there are some pleasant field-walks left about Hendon, and as our tram for the next two or three miles will show us little beside workhouse palaces and the like, the reader may as well be taken on towards Edgware by a circuitous route across country. About two miles north of the Hendon heights another ridge is crowned by the more eminent features of Mill Hill. For this one may make by two paths starting from Hendon Churchyard, on either side of a line of villas projecting northwards. The field-path on the west side is to be preferred for its open view on the heights of Harrow and Stanmore. After a mile it comes into a road, that bridges the Great Northern Railway branch to Edgware, and presently turns up an avenued way, from the top of which a path mounts over park-like meadows with fine backward prospects, leading into Mill Hill opposite its “King’s Head.” If here one turned right as far as the “Adam and Eve,” beside it one could come back to Hendon by the other path above mentioned, passing near the Great Northern Railway Station, from which a road climbs to Mill Hill’s “Angel and Crown.” Such a place has to take the consequences of its loftiness in keeping both its valley stations at a distance, a mile or so to the south. Down the northern slope of the ridge lead other pleasant field-ways, that would bring us to Totteridge on the next swell of land, which belongs to that inlet of Hertfordshire crossed by the Great North Road.

This finely situated village straggles roomily along the swarded and shaded ridge road, dropping at the west end into a valley in which lies its Midland station. Where our paths from Hendon come out upon the road, to the left we have the Church, making a very modest appearance in face of a Nonconformist neighbour that turns a conspicuous face to the south. This is Mill Hill School, founded a century ago as a Congregational seminary, and now flourishing as an undenominational public school, which has had among its pupils Judge Talfourd, Lamb’s friend, and among its masters Dr. Murray, of the “Oxford Dictionary,” an enterprise begun here in the “Scriptorium,” that made a treasured shrine till lately destroyed by fire. Older relics are the cedars and other fine trees, some of them said to have been planted by the hands of LinnÆus, when these grounds made Collinson’s Botanic Garden. The school has now a chapel that would open the eyes of primitive sectaries, and a museum representing the natural history of the neighbourhood.

While this school has thrown off all particularity of austere dissent, Mill Hill bears a banyan-grove of Catholic institutions, which stand prominent about the ridge, St. Vincent’s Orphanage to the east, at the other end a Franciscan nunnery with an adjacent industrial school, and behind it St. Joseph’s Missionary College, its tower crowned by a conspicuous gilt statue, stamped on the memory of its alumni in all parts of the heathen world. The place seems thus to be mostly made up of public buildings, the more so now that barracks have been built at the east end of the ridge; but of late there appear signs of suburban invasion towards the Midland station.

The wanderer in no hurry should by all means keep on to the west end of Mill Hill, and thence mount to Highwood, a height running across to the next ridge, thus gained most pleasantly when the clay bottom between is well soaked. Highwood itself is a select hamlet, about the gates of three mansions and their grounds. The gardens of the Moat Manor make a sight open on Sundays, and here is another relic of old London, ex-neighbour of Temple Bar, the Hall of Serjeants’ Inn, re-erected by the late Serjeant Cox, on the dissolution of the society. Highwood House, where Coventry Patmore lived in his youth, was once the home of Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore and of the Zoological Gardens, who had Samuel Wilberforce for a neighbour. On coming up to a little patch of green before the “Rising Sun,” one can turn along by a road of grand old trees hiding these mansions, which presently reaches a stile looking over to the ridge on which Barnet stands, and here forks, the left branch going up to Barnet Gate, the right one running airily along the Totteridge ridge with its mile of village green. Or, a little way beyond the “Rising Sun,” one might have taken a lane turning left by the gate of Moat Manor, then presently a field-path to the right, which goes down and up to the road by Barnet Gate, giving off a left fork to reach this road nearer Elstree. So near London it is not easy to find a stretch of country that seems so well to keep its rural innocence wedded to squirely dignity, though, indeed, its squires are now like to have the luck of being Metropolitan brewers or newspaper proprietors.

To get back to Watling Street from Highwood, one takes the road downhill in the other direction, turning to the right where in doubt till Dean’s Brook is passed, beside which a path cuts across towards the station at Edgware. Turns to the left would have fetched Mill Hill Midland Station, whence a path leads to the winding lane that reaches the London end of Edgware through its dependency Hale. From Hendon the shortest line is through Colin Dale, by which, perhaps, came a branch of the ancient way leading over Hampstead Heath.

On the opposite side of the Edgware Road, marked ways go off towards Kingsbury and Harrow. There is not much to say about Red Hill and the last two miles of this road, on which the tram-line stops for the present at the top of the village street, still looking like a real village, with old inns that hint at its importance in coaching days. The original name is said to have been Edgworth, transplanted into Ireland by the family of the novelist. On the right turns off the way to the station, beyond the Church, with its ancient tower. The turning to the left, for Stanmore, leads in a few minutes to Whitchurch, where Handel was, or was not, organist for a time; and in the churchyard is the tomb of William Powell, that Edgware Vulcan whose rhythmic hammerings were understood to have suggested the melody of the “Harmonious Blacksmith”; but this legend is doubtful. Dr. W. H. Cummings, in his book on Handel, claims to have proved it a fable. This church is notable for the Chandos tombs and the elaborate ornamentation supplied by the prodigal Duke of Chandos, who was Handel’s patron as well as Hogarth’s. His seat, Canons Park, still overshadows Whitchurch and the upper end of Edgware with its timber, but it seems about to share the fate of all “eligible building land” so near London.

James Brydges, first Duke of Chandos, held the then profitable office of Paymaster-General under Queen Anne, and out of its perquisites built here what Defoe described as the most magnificent palace in the kingdom, surrounded by gardens and canals that could be equalled only at Wanstead Park, another English Versailles, now a playground of East-End Londoners. The Canons household numbered over a hundred persons, including a guard to make the rounds of the park at night, and musicians for giving that despoiler of the public purse the luxury of a full choral service in his chapel, to accompany a preacher who “never mentioned hell to ears polite.” At his dinner in public state each course was proclaimed by a flourish of trumpets. Nor was music the only art he patronized in an outlay which seems to have given Pope a cue for his satirical account of Timon’s Villa.

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.

After his death the huge construction vanished like a South 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

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 an alias of 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 it was 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 city of England, its Roman structures beheld with such wonder by rude Saxon invaders that they attributed it to the Watling giants 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.