THE road 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 Hanwell across 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 a fork 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]

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 his Hours of Idleness it may be gathered

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:

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,

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 been built 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 of John 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 moated farm, 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 Weald and 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 guide Around London of 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-west from 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.

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 into the 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, through reaches 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 the bouquet of 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 Hampstead Heath, 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 Cobbett faisait des siennes in spurning its flats as “all ugly.”