Advancing on the ridge road, we pass “Jack Straw’s Castle,” a famous old tavern that holds its head high after catering for patrons like Dickens and Macready. I bear in mind nearly forty years with what dignified pity the head waiter handed back his tip of twopence to a country parson not duly aware of this being no common public-house. Here, to the left, goes off at an acute angle the Hendon Road, dividing the Upper Heath into its west and north sections. Above the latter the ridge road runs straight on to that other old hostelry, the “Spaniards,” in the garden of which Mrs. Bardell was arrested while carousing with her friends on the elusive profits of her action against Mr. Pickwick. A landmark at this further end is the conspicuous group of Italian pines that have figured on many a canvas, so as to be perhaps the best-known feature of Hampstead scenery. On the right of the ridge road here the Lower Heath has a park-like aspect, borne out by a large red mansion intruding itself towards the edge of Caen Wood. But the most richly ragged part of the common, sweetest in blossom-time and glorious in autumn, lies to the other side.
To see the Upper Heath at its best one should descend upon it from outside the buildings about “Jack Straw’s Castle,” making towards the Leg of Mutton Pond at the western edge. Keeping round this edge to the north, one presently comes to the grounds of Golder’s Hill, seat of Sir Spencer Wells, and after his death saved from the builder to make a public paradise, where, indeed, as often happens in such cases, the mansion has proved to be rather a white elephant. Beyond this, among a cluster of refreshment-houses, across the Hendon Road, their doyen is the “Bull and Bush,” with its old-fashioned garden, traditional resort of Addison, Garrick, Hogarth, Sterne, and other celebrities. Next is reached the double hamlet of North End and Wildwood, a charmingly secluded group of cottages and mansions, one of them North End House, famed as the gloomy retreat of the great Lord Chatham. We might hence gain the Hendon Road up a grand avenue of chestnuts faced by lime-trees, which is not always discovered by wanderers on the Heath. But the leisurely explorer is advised to hold on to the common beyond the houses, and there turn left to a knoll commanding an expanse of green, bordered by the Hendon heights beyond the Finchley Road. At this edge of the Heath a scheme is on foot for planting a “Garden Suburb,” as homœopathic remedy against any eruption of vulgar building.
Still keeping to the edge of the Heath, one comes up to its northern end by that fragmentary avenue of storm-beaten pines near which Erskine House stands beside the “Spaniards,” according to one story so named as having been once the residence of a Spanish
ambassador, while another explanation of the sign makes its origin like that of a more widely famed Keller, whose landlord was an Auerbach man. At the time of the Gordon Riots this inn was kept by a man who seems to have passed for a Spaniard among his neighbours, of one of whom he well earned grateful favour. When Lord Mansfield’s town-house had been burned by the mob, a body of rioters swarmed out to attack Caen Wood, but were cunningly delayed by this landlord with free supplies of drink till soldiers could be brought up to protect the judge’s mansion.
Beside the road onwards now swells, to the right, a noble mass of timber in the park of the Earls of Mansfield, who still possess Caen Wood, while they have another most enviable home at Scone Palace on the Tay. If ever this family were driven to mend their fortune, like others of our aristocracy, by marrying a Chicago millionaire’s daughter, they might choose rather to sell such a valuable property, which as yet has been kept safe from the suburban builder. But the episcopal estate on the other side of the road has ceased to give sanctuary to Nature, as we may see by Bishopswood Avenue, running off towards East Finchley, and further threats of streets in this direction, though opposite the gate of Caen Wood, below the “Spaniards,” a field-way still leads to the “Five Bells” of Finchley.