The Middlesex Border Walk takes the idea of the Middlesex Greenway further and wider – to walk all around the borders of Middlesex. It has been a little while since my last county walking effort, but I have made a good start, turning a theoretical line on a map into a real walk.
The Middlesex Boundary Path is an independent project, developed here for the Association of British Counties, but building on a great deal of work put by Stephen Collins on the Middlesex Greenway. It is a draft route is as far as it has not been walked: the process of walking it will turn ideas into reality.
Walking it
This was always going to be a suburban walk, or so it started. From Staines by the bank of the Thames, the route follows the Middlesex Greenway – the first morning I spend on that walk from Staines to Uxbridge I have written about before; from where Middlesex meets Surrey and Buckinghamshire, north beside the River Colne over heath and Heathrow until the canal and suburban paths to Uxbridge town centre. Mercifully that part of the walk is still there – not obliterated by the threatened growth of the airport. The new ground is going north from Uxbridge.
Coming from Uxbridge town centre, I walked down to the Braybourne – a brook which at the start looks like a stream constrained by urban planners, but which further up shows its liberated self as a woodland country stream, notwithstanding the housing waiting to either side. This is also initially part of the Middlesex Greenway, but where the Greenway crosses the brook and goes north-east, I continued until the roar of the A40, and here the woods are wasted like a half-industrial landscape in places. A short cut across to the Grand Union Canal and the Colne, and I was on the canal towpath, heading north, under the grim viaduct of the M40, and onto more familiar ground: I have cycled this way before.
It is a mix of nature and infrastructure up the canal: the canal is an industrial artefact, but imitating the river that flows beside supplying it with water; largely reclaimed by nature, but in its artificial straight cut, and with viaducts flung overheads bearing rail and road – the latest being the monumental HS2 viaduct, which I would consider a glorious wonder of engineering if it were not wrecking a fine landscape and emptying my own pocket and yours to do so.
Coming to the road which crosses over to West Hyde on the Hertfordshire bank, I met the route I took to nip across on the Hertfordshire Border Walk: from this point I was following Middlesex’s border with Hertfordshire, so the two would soon coincide, but instead of following that path east, I continued north, to stick closer to the county border. Here, the prettiness of the setting has attracted a property developer to build new houses, and I understand why. After passing through though, I came to woods above the Colne, and then burst into a beautiful, long, sloping meadow. This leads further north to the first buildings of Springwell Farm. Here I was almost at the north-easternmost point of the county, and here I turned east.
If you believe that Middlesex is just an urban and suburban county, this corner shows you another side – I walked amongst farms and fields for several miles.
A cut through a part of Hertfordshire was necessitated by the geography, all on farmland and woods, until I emerged at Batchworth Common , because there, just beyond the Prince of Wales, is hidden footpath which runs along the Middlesex-Hertfordshire border. This was a duplication of part of the Hertfordshire Border Walk, from the other end. The path cuts straight through dense suburban developments that overspread the county border, but as it is enclosed behind garden fences, it clings to being a thin strip of the country path ot once was. I think I was an hour and a half on this bizarre path (I should have taken notes) before emerging at te corner of Oxhey Wood and Pinner Wood.
Here I realised that my original walk plan was not the best. I took the Middlesex side of the border, through plush modern, private streets to Pinner Wood, on a path over the Pinnerwood Golf Club, to Pinnerwood Farm. Here I called an end to the walk for the day, and walked on to Hatch End Station.
The next leg, I think, would best be plotted from Hatch End’s playing fields out to wards Grim’s Ditch – however that if for another time.