After my last walk on the Middlesex border, I took a break for shorter, family walks and fells (which I might write up). On Tuesday I resumed the route from where I left off, at Hatch End.
Much of the route was to follow the Middlesex Greenway, which is an excellent route. The intent here is to go further out, tickling the county’s border with Hertfordshire, so I started further north than the Middlesex Greenway and looped away where I could – often using the ‘London LOOP’ path.
This leg was just under 17 miles, though if you take account of the several unmarked missteps and retracing my path, it was longer.
Walking it
The start of this section looked like a suburban walk, up a very plush road, but at the end of the road I could see a gate, and green fields of Oxheylane Farm beyond it. Soon I was out of the conurbation, crossing Grim’s Ditch Golf Club – I have never understood why a chap would spoil a good walk by stopping to hit an impractically small ball as he goes, but I do appreciate the way golf clubs have halted the spread of concrete. Beyond the famed Grim’s Ditch Hotel, I resumed the Greenway on Harrow Weald Common.
(A householder in a cottage in the woods greeted me at the gate and said that the path is on the London LOOP, and many walkers go by with their heads down, glued to ‘phones and the LOOP app. I walk with a paper map and a compass. That said, if I had used an app, and had the data, I might have not have gone wrong so far where the path had been grubbed up and diverted or signage disappeared.)
Following the Middlesex Greenway route through Bentley Priory to Stanmore Common, I went on a big loop through the wood looking for a path that is no longer there, before returning to the road, and finding London LOOP signs up past the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. The path north-east past the end of the hospital is not well marked and the beaten track goes the wrong way: keep in a compass direction until a miniature farm with deep mud and horses comes into view by the M1, where there is a tunnel under the motorway (but not under the A41). At this point the original plan had been to resume the Middlesex Greenway, but in the last stretch I had not strayed more than about 500 yards from Middlesex’s border, so I went north to take a more boring but edgy route, up the road to Elstree Village.
Elstree, for those who do not know the area, is a small, modern town in Hertfordshire indistinguishable from Borehamwood, but Elstree Village is the original knot of cottages and shops at the crossroads on the A411 which is the county border. From the crossroads then I walked east along border.
Eventually there is a little path, also a part of the London LOOP, south through the woods (the ‘Scratchwood Open Space’). In time it leads to the A1 – which is uncrossable until a subway a long trudge to the south and then back again on the other side, and over Moats Mount. It was in this wood that I got lost in the rain on the Hertfordshire Border Walk. It was dry this time and I could see the paths. I emerged then on Hendon Wood Lane (where the county border runs along the northern part of the lane), and south on a path to Mill Hill. These woods and this wooded path make me think about the oddness of names that Whitehall sticks on places they have never seen – all of this has been in places where administration insists on names beginning ‘London Borough of’, but which are as alien to London as if the were on the Moon.
At Mill Hill it looked as if this was once again to be a suburban walk: a confident suburban Middlesex town, though edging against the fields through which flows the Dollis Book which marks the end of the county. From here I resumed the Middlesex Greenway for the rest of the afternoon. I had walked this way a few years ago. Now where the fields had begun there was a massive new high-rise housing development, pushing at the edge of the farms. Last time I was here it was getting dark, but this time I managed to find the right, unmarked path through the last farm, wading deep though mud churned up by horses. Horses were really a theme of the walk. Two beasts looked up and as one charged at a gallop towards me – playful things. Out of the field, I was onto roads and suburbia.
Woodside Park Station was the obvious stopping place but I carried on to Southgate, though streets and a chain of pleasant parks. I had not planned so far and was uncertain where the county border runs: I know it can be walked along here. I called it a day at New Southgate station.
The next leg will need planning, as I skirt the edge of the borderline deep in urban development, and head for Potters Bar. There is time for that later.