the decay of walking, when even the men of my time have too much gone astray after golf, which is simply an intermittent walk, attended with considerable expense, made in the unprofitable and unprofited society of caddies, and spoiled at every turn by the anxiety of driving little balls into ugly holes with instruments which a scientific observer has pronounced “singularly ill adapted for that purpose.” As for the girls who stretch their limbs at this game, as at hockey or tennis, they may be not so ill employed, since walking over Middlesex fields seems contra-indicated by their boots and other impediments.
The right way to see and love Middlesex is at the jog-trot pace of Shanks’ mare, breaking no wind and no records. In my guide, Around London, I have traced many paths which are also pointed out to willing eyes in other booklets of the kind. The present volume’s aim is to take a more general and sweeping view of this county; yet I hope, as we trudge along together, to give the reader many hints as to where and how he may explore its often hidden charms. As for matters of history, statistics, geology, and so forth, I refer him to the tomes in which I should have to look for such information, only advising him that a certain encyclopædia must not be trusted in its flattering of Middlesex soil as “mainly gravelly.” Let him not go by that authority when choosing his boots for a tramp here. Nor should they be seven-leagued boots, as thus, in every direction, their first stride would take him over the border of a neighbour shire. On one side, indeed, less than four miles beyond the limits of a London borough, he can shake off the dust of this county in Herts; on another, he has only to cross the Lea to be in Essex before he seems to have got clear of London streets; on a third, any bridge of the Thames will take him into Surrey, from which, when all is said and seen, he may be in no haste to get back into Middlesex.
II
HAMPSTEAD AND HIGHGATE
THE Switzerland of Middlesex is a name that has been fondly given to those heights closing the vista up northward openings from Oxford Street. Hampstead ranks as a London borough, and so should stand out of the scope of our survey. But we cannot pass by the cream of the county’s scenery, even though it has been half spoiled to make the choicest of suburbs, a crowd of homes for the classes, and a holiday resort for the masses, with suburblets and dependencies of its own in once outlying hamlets like South Hill, North End, Child’s Hill, Belsize, and so on, not to speak of adjoining districts that cling to its skirts by such usurped titles as South Hampstead and West Hampstead.
Middlesex has other hills as high and bold as Hampstead, which owes its eminent amenity to a topping of Bagshot sand, here rarer than in Surrey, giving a dry and broken surface, natural nursery for heath and copsewood. Heedless digging out of sand and gravel has but increased the picturesque irregularity; and even the enclosures filched from the common in former days add a charm of contrast, where the richer greenery of private groves or avenues masses itself above the scarred mounds and hollows, so wildly overgrown, so deviously threaded by embowered tracks among thorny tangles, bosky knolls, thickets of bracken and broom. It takes a poet to describe the manifold aspects of this half-tamed wilderness:
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