New Southgate Station, I find is actually in Friern Barnet, but with no gap between the villages, they can become indistinguishable. If this leg of the walk started like that, it was not to stay that way, as suburb opened into woodland, common, farms and what remains of the open Middlesex countryside.
I started at my previous finishing point, and headed into Southgate. It seems at first approach like any other deep-in-the-suburb town, but this is at the edge of the county and with plenty of green space to remind one that it was all fields not so long ago. After the big road junction, the border with Hertfordshire runs along the A1003 for some way: in the midst of this part a shaft of green space passes through, of parks on the course of the Pymme’s Brook. The brook has a convenient path along it, but it is at that point running from within Hertfordshire and my course lay with the county border. After a wiggle through a small sports field, I emerged to find the border again as I turning north-north-west at the circular art-oddity that is Southgate Station.
It is a long road north, first by shops then houses and playing fields. All this so far had been Southgate – it is a huge area, reflecting that Southgate was one of Middlesex’s largest ancien parishes. Eventually there is a break, a large roundabout, and then I was in Cockfosters, stil on the same road, and out the other end to Cockfosters Station (which Tube fans will know is the northern terminus of the Piccadilly Line). It looks like a half-abandoned rural station.
Here I turned off, westwards as the county border runs – here Middlesex is to the north and Hertfordshire to the south. A little lane passes a very edgy church (at least in the sense that the edge of the county grazes its western end) and least up to Monken Hadley Common.
Monken Hadley Common is a delight after all that suburban townscape – an untamed woodland, in a narrow wedge, but almost two miles long, with the final part becoming a heath reaching Monken Hadley, as pretty a village as one may find for many a mile. Through the village and over its village green I came into the indecisively named Chipping Barnet (according to its sign) or High Barnet (according to the Ordnance Survey), which is back into the edge of the conurbation.
The county border through Barnet is parallel to and just north of the A411 but with no way to follow it so closely while staying on the Middlesex side, so I cut through the little residential roads almost randomly to get to a footpath at the very edge of the conurbation, and, after another short street of the last houses, emerged on a footpath through farmland. I took the path north-west, a nip across the corner to Galley Lane, which runs north-north-west and again marks the county border, with Hertfordshire to the west and Middlesex to the east.
I walked the road for a mile. Houses soon stopped and I passed two farms, and reached the corner of the Dyrham Park Estate (unrelated to the more famous estate of that name in Gloucestershire). The estate is a private golf and country club so it cannot be cut across, but there is a footpath around the edge, through trees. Occasional glances of golf being played – I prefer my walk unspoiled.
At the corner, by the gatehouse to the estate, is a choice: left or right. Turn right here (I will get to that in a bit). I however thought that I would get closer to the border by turning left, walking along Trotters Bottom, a very difficult lane, to head up the track by Dyrham Park Farm, which is marked as accessible. That was a mistake. Apart from the track’s being barred, once you get to the A1 it stops – no tunnel or bridge or anything. It was a long tramp back on a pavementless lane full of speeding drivers, all wasting about two miles and leaving me fed up.
So, turn right, across the road and there is a path through woods to Dancers Hill; a tiny Middlesex hamlet, and one of the few left. From here a footpath leads out to the edge of the M25, then along and under it, to emerge at a familiar path – the one which runs behind South Mimms Services (a walk from a while ago that I have not yet written up). Threading through the services, I found the lane that goes over the M1 to South Mimms village. Rather than going straight through the village, I took a path in a loop westwards, to the edge of the M25 and, more to the point, close to the edge of the county, before it led me back to the north end of the village, to Blackhorse Lane.
Along the lane the village peters out, and I found myself at a corner i have reached before – on the Hertfordshire Border Walk, at the beginning of a lovely footpath through the woods and along the county border; Mymmshall Wood in Middlesex to the south-east and Hawkshead Wood in Hertfordshire to the north-west. The path curves through the woods to emerge eventually at the M1, which here is bridged, taking me to a hamlet (Water End?) dominated by a food defence gate, and which is by Middlesex’s northernmost point.
Heading south from there, the planned path appears to have been grubbed up. A close path though, beside the lane, runs down to a path leading east through farmland until an industrial estate at the north end of Potters Bar. A dogleg under the railway leads to a parkland, then at last into Potters Bar, where I trudged along the last, residential road to the day’s end point on the corner of Church Road. (Then had to walk half a mile down the road to the station.)