Full many a sprightly race,
Disporting on its margin green,
The paths of pleasure trace.
About this height, shining in Dr. Parr’s eyes “with the united glories of Zion and Parnassus,” cluster the buildings of a school that stands high among “our public hives of puerile resort.” The Church had been built by Lanfranc, when “Herga” was a manor and seat of the Canterbury Primates. The School was founded under Elizabeth by John Lyon, that public-spirited squireen or yeoman of Preston, at which his house still stands, and he has a memorial in the church among other old brasses and ornaments. The tercentenary of his school came in 1871, when a fund was raised among Harrovians to add the new buildings that throw into shade their old schoolroom, boasting the names of Byron, Peel, Palmerston, and others destined to be carved on our national records. The chapel is rather older, but till two generations ago the boys attended the Parish Church. Scattered around are the boarding-houses that have sprung up about a modest nucleus; then further afield come the playing-grounds, almost as important as schoolrooms in contemporary theories of education.
Harrow has had its ups and downs; but long ago it passed out of the rank of a provincial grammar-school, and it now counts some 600 scholars who, what with work and play, have not much time for lying on tombstones and gazing at sunsets. Under rulers of Liberal sentiments, it came to be looked on as rather the Whig public school; yet, as sign of scholastic conservatism, the costume of the upper boys is still the absurd swallow-tail coat of our great-grandfathers, which produces a most incongruous effect when worn with a straw hat and flannel trousers. The Duke of Genoa, who lived with Matthew Arnold, and had the crown of Spain offered him as still a Harrow schoolboy, was precociously bearded while his rank in the school kept him in short jackets; then the arbiters of such matters were for granting him the privilege of “charity tails”; but the young Prince is understood to have refused such a distinction till earned by merit.
That pious founder would rub his eyes could he see to what has grown the school he meant, no doubt, mainly for the benefit of his neighbours’ boys, though he allowed the entrance of “foreigners,” who have ousted the natives. The sons of yeomen and tradesmen are now provided for by a humbler seminary, an inch of the endowment being appropriated to them rather than an ell. But as day-boys are admitted as well as boarders in the masters’ houses, families of the better class have been brought to settle here, to the prospering of Harrow, now expanded with a population of over 10,000, spread out in smart streets and lines of villas that run into once outlying hamlets.
Nearly two miles to the north lies Wealdstone, a village that gives a sub-title to Harrow’s railway station on the London and North Western Railway. The Metropolitan and Great Central station, distinguished as Harrow-on-the-Hill, comes a mile nearer on the same road, at Greenhill. Now the District Railway has an electric line to Roxeth, on the south side of Harrow Hill. The school authorities appear not much concerned to promote close intercourse with Metropolitan distractions; and as yet they have been able to play Canute to the trams threatening to advance from Harlesden. Therein they ill follow the example of John Lyon, who left part of his endowment for improving the roads that, on this heavy clay soil, kept waggons a whole day jolting from Harrow to London.
The meadows round the hill are traversed by foot-ways, some of them, indeed, overlaid by new roads; but there still run many pleasant paths through the fields, and Harrow’s learned masters profess to be able to find their way for a dozen miles across country, with few interruptions of macadam. By such paths, eastwards, one can make for the hamlets of Kenton and Preston, and so on to Edgware or Kingsbury over that interval of open country already mentioned. Westwards, over flatter ground, lie the leafy hamlets we shall come to presently from Pinner. Southwards are reached the still genuine villages of Northholt, Greenford, and Yeading, in that “Pure Vale” of our next chapter. Northwards the wooded brow of Harrow Weald makes a contrast of scenery, to which the straight way is by the populous road through Wealdstone and the further village called Harrow Weald, a name representing the slope of forest now trimmed and enclosed as private parks. Through these the road leads up to the “Hare,” where to the left opens Harrow Weald Common, and a mile further on the cross-roads at the edge of Bushey Heath mark that highest point of Middlesex we have already reached from Stanmore.
It is a good hour’s walk from Harrow Church to its lofty common. Feet impatient of road-tramping can reach it a little more deviously by turning off to the left, nearly a mile beyond Wealdstone, at the “Alma.” This path may seem not very promising at first, but it bends as a bit of road round an enclosure, and ends as a green lane leading up to the road through Hatch End at the foot of the ridge. On the other side of this road, a few paces to the right, opens a narrow path, converging with a better one that goes off through wicket-gates at the corner in the other direction, towards Pinner. This mounts up to a farm and thence to a pretty hamlet bearing the nickname “Harrow Weald City,” beside which one gets on to the Common, a broken and roughly-wooded expanse commanding fine views from its knolls and edges. At the west end is the park enclosure of Graeme’s Dyke House, the home of Mr. W. S. Gilbert, who here figures as a grave magistrate and substantial squire, but elsewhere has dealt in “magic and spells.” The name he spells so is from Grim’s Dyke, a very ancient rampart which has been held to mark the limit of Belgic intrusion among Celtic tribes; but the same name belongs to similar works in other parts of England, and the origin of this one seems uncertain. It may be traced as a slight swell in the meadows to the right of a road hence descending to join Oxhey Lane, the way for Watford, across which a path along the Dyke holds on to Pinner.
The highroad from Harrow to Pinner is not very pleasing in its first stage; but here again the pedestrian may turn a little out of his way with advantage. A lane to the right, near the Recreation Ground, brings him up to the Headstone, now a picturesquely moated farm, once a seat of the Archbishops of Canterbury; and thence a field-path rambles greenly on to Pinner Church. On the other side of the highroad, one could have taken a path, westward from the cricket field below Harrow Church, to the rifle butts, where it ends as a lane presently crooking north to lead into the shady outskirts of Pinner.
Pinner is a good old village that has taken a vigorous new growth on the stalk of the Metropolitan Railway, rooted in the business quarters of London. It still keeps an air of rustic charm among the sophistications of villadom, and it is ringed about with parks and pretty hamlets—Pinner Green further on the road, Eastcote to the south, Woodridings and Hatch End to the north, connected by crooked lanes and green paths, which, indeed, begin to be too often cut up by builders. Its heart may be marked at the station of the Metropolitan line, which here plays the part of landlord as well as carrier. From the railway and the Pin brook, turns up the main street, showing some old houses, real and artificial, as it mounts to the Church, an ancient one, altered and restored with picturesque effect in its shady nook. In the churchyard stands prominent the ivy-wreathed tomb of William Loudon, a Scotsman, who a century ago had the whim of directing that he should be buried above ground, as he is in this curious structure. It is more than a mile on to the London and North Western station, which, near a lordly pile of Commercial Travellers’ schools, marks the north purlieus of the place, whence one can ascend to Harrow Weald and Bushey Heath by Grim’s Dyke or by the path from Hatch End already mentioned.
On this rising ground it is less easy to miss one’s way; but I despair of helping my reader not to lose himself in the labyrinth of shady roads, muddy, grassy lanes and bowery paths that lead southwards and westwards from Pinner, through a delightful country, difficult to describe without a repetition of hackneyed epithets. The best I can do is to recommend him to No. 1 of a little series of penny guides published at the booking offices of the Metropolitan Railway, in which he has a selection of these ways traced for him; or he might find the west section of my guide Around London of use, like other pathfinders of the kind. But the advice I should give myself, if at leisure on a fine day, would simply be to get lost in a leafy maze dotted with guide-posts to keep one from going far astray, even without the help of map and compass.