Sweet Hampstead and Its Associations

by Caroline A. White

This path led over the easiest of stiles through a little lane between hedges of hawthorn and elder by an old nursery garden and cottage where strawberries and cream were to be had in the season, and a cup of tea at all times, and so to South End or such portion of it as was not already changed to railway uses. The houses here were of a humbler description than those in the Flask Walk, but there were sufficient indications in little garden-borders, in roses trained about the doors, in vines wholly untrained, running to an excess of leafiness over walls and roofs, in a group of straw bee-hives, sheltered in a corner, to show how pretty and rustic the place had once been. There was the down-trodden, worn-out Green, with its white palings and rickety turnstile, in itself a protest to the farther use of it, and lime-trees, out of all proportion to the small houses you saw between them, large-limbed and flourishing.

An ascending row of houses to the right, on what is now South Hill Park, occupied the levelled slopes the summits of which when I first knew the lovely neighbourhood afforded charming views, and not the least charming that of the eastern outskirts of Hampstead, sweeping up amidst a profusion of foliage towards the high ground about Squire’s Mount, with a foreground of water and groups of trees studding the undulating surface, the fields on the east bounded by the remarkable mound which now bears the name of Parliament Hill, but was then known by the more striking one of Traitors’ Hill.

Ainsworth has made it memorable as the scene whence some of the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot watched for the explosion of the Houses of Parliament at the hands of Guy Faux. Park, who refers to Stukeley’s ‘Itinerary’ on various occasions, takes no notice of this eminence.

Mr. Lloyd, in his published ‘Lecture on Caen Wood,’ tells us that when Mr. Bills purchased the estate of Sir James Harrington, amongst the properties belonging to it was a windmill, ‘which occupied the fine site of the summit of Parliament Hill, where the trench formed by the removal of its foundations is still to be traced. It was, doubtless, the Manor mill.’

Tumulus.

At one time it was presumed that, like the mound in the field to the right of the path to Highgate, which Lord Mansfield caused to be enclosed and planted with Scotch firs, it was a tumulus. In support of this idea there is a tradition of Saxon times still extant of this neighbourhood. Was it not about the skirts of Highgate that Alfred encamped with his troops to protect the citizens of London, whilst they gathered in the harvest from the surrounding fields, from Hastings of the Ivory Horn, who lay with his Danish army beside the Lea, ready to pillage them of their summer fruits? And might not some great battle have been fought, and have resulted in the raising of this mound? Alas for romance! When a few summers ago a child at play in its neighbourhood unearthed the hidden treasure of some threatened home, buried for safety’s sake in troublous times, or the booty of some thief, whose after-career interfered with his return for it, a search into the interior of the mound, under the direction of the County Council, dispelled the theories of the antiquaries and the dreams of romancists.[1]

But whatever its origin, the mound adds materially to the visual enjoyment of the visitor; and the sight of London from its height, especially at the early dawn of a clear summer’s day, is said to be worth a midnight pilgrimage to obtain. The air blows over its summit ‘most sweetly,’ especially in June, blending the scent of the lime blossoms from the sister villages with the aroma of the hayfields and hedgerows, where the honeysuckle and wild-rose bloom unmolested.

Facing round, we have Highgate Hill in view, with white modern houses showing here and there, and others roof-high in the foliage of surrounding trees. Of the ancient hamlet we see only a ridge of red-tiled roofs showing in the neighbourhood of the church.

To the north, where the grounds of Caen Wood come sweeping down to the brimming ponds, on which the swans ‘float double, swan and shadow,’ the landscape widens into one of rare beauty. Park-like beyond the park, in its alternations of lawny slope and little dells and groups of trees, it looks like a portion of the demesne, and not the least picturesque and lovely part of it.[2]