‘Like snakes in wild festoon,
In ramous wrestlings interlaced,
A forest Laocoön.’[174]
The upright of the gibbet, by one of those curious freaks common to ancient landlords, who early learnt the attractiveness of morbid curiosities, and knew with Trinculo that ‘those who will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar will lay out ten to see a dead Indian,’ was converted into a part of the kitchen mantelpiece at Jack Straw’s Castle, serving thenceforth as a fertile subject for the ale-consuming and company-constraining gossip of times not so long past, when few cared to cross the Heath alone after nightfall—times of which Hicks’s Hall and the Newgate Calendar keep record still.
Old Cottages, North End.
Passing Heath Lodge, we leave the footpath for the main road, and find ourselves at North End. In Elizabeth’s time this was literally wildwood and waste. Here, as at Belsize, Gerard found what he calls the white butterfly orchis, ‘near unto a small cottage in the way as you go from London to Hendon, a village thereby, in the field next the pound, or pinnefold without.’
North End, so called from its situation at the northern extremity of the Heath, consists of a cluster of middle-class houses, cottages, and pleasant gardens. It does not seem, says Park, to be a place of any antiquity. No doubt the Wildwood, as the fragment of the old forest was quaintly called, formerly overran the site of the present hamlet, and lingered here after the clearance of the woods from other portions of the district.
We find it marked in the map of Middlesex in Gibson’s edition of Camden’s ‘Britannia’ (1695) as Wildwood Corner. It had been so called in Elizabeth’s time, and the tradition survives in the names of certain messuages, as Wildwood, Wildwood House, Wildwood Lodge, etc.