Walking round London 3

A vigorous seven mile walk on Saturday, the next stage of my walk round London.  I'd planned to do more, and planned it for the Sunday, but fears of Noye's Fludde made me change the day.  Started off in a railway station, South Kenton, and walked for about a mile and a half through residential areas, all of them with concreted front gardens for their cars, most dispiriting.  But then, into Fryent Country Park, starting with the ascent of 282 foot Barn Hill, up through pleasant woods to the summit pond and a very close view of the new Wembley stadium - and a very distant one of Canary Wharf, which gives a measure of the walking still to do before I turn westwards again.  The pond was covered in small yellow lilies, and there were a lot of different dragonflies about.

Down from the hill, and into open meadows, and a second smaller summit, with extensive views to the north and west, where I could plainly see Harrow-on-the-Hill. The meadows were home to a lot of kestrels, and I could admire their plunging hunting, and their lovely hovering and swooping, but this photograph was the best I could manage.

As I left the meadows, I cam into Kingsbury, where I passed the "new St Andrew's" church - actually built in 1847 in Marylebone and transported here, stone by stone, in 1931 - where it is next to "old St Andrew's".  Musing on this,  I made my way out to the end of the Brent Reservoir.  Like Barn Hill, this was completely unknown to a west Londoner like me, and is really rather attractive.  It is over a mile long, and was once a major London tourist attraction in its own right, with its own railway station and pub (The Welsh Harp) - and in 1948, the Olympic rowing was held here.  Now its a pleasant lake for sailing, a bird reserve, flower meadows and of course, a reservoir - a large expanse of water formed by damming the tiny Brent river. 

In the meadows of Fryent, and around, Brent, summer is in full blast, but the harbingers of autumn are already here, blackberries,  horse-chestnuts, rowan, and sloe. 

 

When I left the Brent reservoir, and entered Hendon, I noticed two buildings on the first shopping street I came to - one had very rough worn brickwork, not unattractive, with tiled decorations, high up above the fourth floor.  And the other was an an ethnic restaurant, still relatively unusual in London, designed to make me feel at home (although the welcome was dampened by the fact that it was shut!).

Bookish references on this walk were limited, so I allowed the charming woods of Barn Hill to inspire me to share The Way Through The Woods and The Woods of Westermain with you.  The first of these is a lovely description of how the woods roll back over a road when the traffic ceases:

THEY shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again;

This is Kipling at his gentlest; for a more deliberate, more brutal version of similar events, see Letting in the Jungle in Jungle Books.  The second, one of Meredith's most beautiful poems, is a romantic vision, and a challenge.  It's long, full of lovely words (a yaffle is a green woodpecker, for example), but the opening stanza will give you the mood:

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

Comments

[Equiano]

I'm somewhat jealous of your walking (although we have plenty of beautiful places here too), in that when I lived in London a decade ago, I had a similar sort of idea, but to walk the Thames Walk instead, in sections as you are doing, starting at the source. I never got further than buying the book and cheacking out train/bus timetables. Good for you!