Something of the same irregularity, indeed, we find on beginning to trace the Middlesex bounds from Staines, above which they wander for a few miles as if confused among the delta of branches in which the Colne reaches the Thames. The main stream, to which Ordnance Survey maps grant the title, is that one crawling into Staines by the east side of the Great Northern Railway branch from Uxbridge. Here the boundary has bent a mile or two westwards, at one point touching the Colne Brook, as the branch is called that, from the village of this name, straggles down to the Thames opposite Egham. A pool in the Thames used to bear the nickname of “Colnbrook Churchyard,” the point of the grim jest being that this frontier village had no churchyard, and that the robbers who infested the surrounding moors were in the way of flinging the bodies of their victims into the river. “Moorish” is Spenser’s epithet for the Colne, moor in this part of Britain having commonly implied marshy rather than heathy ground; and behind Staines we get on an unlovely river flat still bearing the name of Staines Moor. But if we incline to hurry away from the Colne as sluggish and defiled by industries, let us remember how dear its waters were to Milton, whose home in youth was at Horton on the Bucks side, whence he had choice of wanderings among
“Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and river wide.”
From Colnbrook the boundary bends back towards the Colne River, with which it presently falls in along the reach from Yiewsley to Uxbridge, where this stream skirmishes out on the western flank of the canal’s straighter march. On the Middlesex side, here, the world is too much with us, and we must not be tempted over to the woods and heaths of Iver, in Bucks. So let us hasten up the canal bank to Uxbridge, where the border takes a crook to the east along a stream known as the Shire Ditch, then, recrossing the canal, once more follows the river as far as the county’s north-western corner.
This upper half of the western boundary is more picturesque than the flats below. Now the Colne runs through a real valley, shut in to the east by a ridge of high ground, looking over to the Bucks village of Denham, and other spots known to artists as well as to anglers. The ridge itself, which a road mounts by the shrunken bounds of Uxbridge Common, has several points both of beauty and interest. Over it for nearly half a dozen miles extends the name of Harefield, associated with that of the Newdigate family, which has such a good chance of fame through their annual vates sacer at Oxford. One of them chose an “Adam Bede” for land agent, whose daughter would widely renown, under an alias, their Warwickshire seat, at which George Eliot had glimpses of squirely life. Another of the Newdigates was well known to our grandfathers as a Parliamentary Protestant champion. Their modern mansion, Harefield Place, comes a couple of miles above Uxbridge, built here to replace the old house, two or three miles further on, that had been destroyed by fire. This was the seat of the Countess of Derby for whom Milton wrote his Arcades, and whose tomb is the most sumptuous of those ornamenting Harefield Church.
On the wooded bank behind the church the site of that defunct home is picturesquely marked by a group of ponds and grand old trees. By what seems to have been once an avenue, a path slopes on up the bank to Breakspear, a still flourishing mansion, beautifully embowered, notable because this manor is said to have belonged to the family of the one English Pope, Adrian IV. Some few years ago, when a Catholic chapel was being consecrated in the neighbourhood, the mason brought duly to wall up the relics in its altar turned out to bear the name of Nicholas Breakspear. At a social function which followed there was naturally some talk of such a coincidence, and an inconsiderate Catholic suggested that the man must be a descendant of his great namesake. “Don’t be taking away a Pope’s character!” cried one jovial Irish priest; to which another made response: “Faith! and it’s no character he had to lose after selling us to the English.” This Pope, who gave Henry II. a title to Ireland in consideration of the payment of Peter’s pence, has been also claimed as a Hertford man; but if Breakspear were his cradle, it stands a good mile within the Middlesex border, about as far to the west of Ruislip reservoir.
Harefield Church, with its show of monuments, lies below its village, beyond which, on the road to Rickmansworth, we come to Harefield Park and Harefield Grove, or, descending into the river valley, we should find a Harefield Moor and a Harefield Wharf on the canal. Harefield is as yet a real country village with quiet inns and roomy green, but ominous placards hold out a threat of “villa residences.” Nothing, indeed, could at present be more unsuburban than the byroad which, at the school-house, turns off along Harefield Park and by the hamlet of Hillend, to wind shadily with westward bends till it drops steeply to the canal, where a huge quarry has uncovered a chalk bank contrasting with variegated disclosures. For at this corner, as at one other, Middlesex shows its age in gouty knuckles of chalk as well as wrinkles of sand.
To reach the extreme north-western nook of the county we must now leave the ridge, to hold for a mile across the flat on which, alongside that cart-horse canal, the Colne goes frisking and sliding in wayward channels, by whose clear shallows the Miltons of to-day must beware how they come angling after poetic images, as these are preserves for the “True Waltonians” of Rickmansworth. At the ford on the further branch, near the village of Mill End, we reach the border-line, which has been kept in view west of the parallel ridge; but now it turns eastward, making a dip to the south as it crosses the river flat, then soon mounting to green bastions moated by the canal.
On this northern side it is that we may find it hard to know at any point whether we are in Middlesex or in Herts. The line runs over high ground a couple of miles south of Rickmansworth, passing between Harefield Grove and Bishop’s Wood, then turning north along the road to Batchworth Heath, that brings us past a large new consumptive hospital, testimony to the airiness of this plateau, more than 300 feet above the sea. The woods on either hand, with their sand-banks and pine-clumps, are jealously fortified by wire and placards; but part of the heath is still open, where we come to the gates of Moor Park, looking over such a fine view southward and eastward. The border-line here passes through the garden of the “Prince of Wales,” crosses the highroad mounting up from Northwood, then for a little is roughly represented by the byroad which drops from the Moor Park gates, making towards a height crowned by the Oxhey Woods; but soon it bends back from this road, and to touch it again we must take a path along the Metropolitan line, beside which we should find it marked by a funereal obelisk, that seems a monument to the rural charms of Northwood, here bleeding to death in red-brick villas. A more prosaic explanation of such landmarks is as showing the limits of the Port of London coal-tax, abolished in our time; but, like the Father of History, I repeat this as told me, not as matter of faith.
From Northwood the border runs on to the bottom of the Oxhey woods, thence trending northwards across the London and North Western line a mile beyond Pinner Station, and keeping a little to the west of Grim’s Dyke, as it mounts on to Harrow Weald Common, and from that to the highest point of Middlesex at the edge of Bushey Heath. Its course now is on the north-west side of Stanmore Common, to touch the Aldenham reservoir, whence it ascends to Elstree, over a sweep of high ground giving fine glimpses on either side, though I cannot make out from what point, hereabouts, Defoe could have had the extensive prospect which set his foreign companions exclaiming that England was all a garden.
They had there on the right Hand, the Town of St. Albans in their View; and all the Spaces between, and further beyond it, look’d indeed like a Garden. The enclos’d Corn-Fields made one grand Parterre, the thick planted Hedge Rows, like a Wilderness or Labyrinth, divided in Espaliers, the Villages interspers’d, look’d like so many several Noble Seats of Gentlemen at a Distance. In a Word it was all Nature, and yet look’d all like Art; on the left Hand we see the West-End of London, Westminster-Abbey and the Parliament-House, but the Body of the City was cut off by the Hill, at which Hampstead intercepted the Sight on that side. More to the South we had Hampton Court and S. W. Windsor, and between both, all those most Beautiful Parts of Middlesex and Surrey, on the Bank of the Thames, of which I have already said so much.