From Hampstead Heath Station a branch of the East Heath Road leads direct to this popular and well-known part of the Lower Heath, while innumerable pathlets traced by the feet of visitors impatient to reach the goal of their pilgrimage all trend in the same direction.
The present name of the Vale dates back to the period of the wells fashion, a period when sheltered places were believed to be more conducive to health than more open ones, especially for invalids.
When the fame of Dr. Gibbon’s ‘Fountain of Health’ brought many visitors to Hampstead, quite a crop of small dwellings rose in this vicinity to meet the needs of a class of invalids unable, or indisposed, to put up at the taverns, or the ‘Wells Dwelling-house,’ or in the then fashionable lodging-houses in Pond Street and the Lower Flask Walk.
Upon the decline of the wells in public estimation, and the consequent falling-off in the number of visitors, many of these easily-run-up habitations (mostly weather-boarded cottages) disappeared. But of the few that survived till quite modern times, some of them, as we shall see, have had remarkable tenants.
The little cluster of cottages upon the margin of the pool in the bottom of the Vale constituted the headquarters of the craft which made the greater part of the population of Hampstead in Tudor times—the laundresses, who washed the linen of the Court and gentry and of the chief City merchants and citizens, abundance of water, dry breezy air, and unlimited bleaching and drying ground, making a very paradise for the suddy sisterhood.
These privileges were possessed by their successors for many years after I first knew Hampstead, who made it appear in the early half of each week as if the grassy spaces between the turf-grown gravel ‘hills and holes,’ as children called them, and all the level growing beds of whortleberry, and coverts of furze, belonged to them.
It was not unpleasing to an idle observer to watch the bringing up from the Vale of the great bucking-baskets of fresh-washed linen by the youngest and strongest of the lavandières, to give them their prettiest appellation, fresh-cheeked, full-chested, large-armed lassies, with elf-locks blowing about their faces, who soon made a wide part of the Heath appear as if an army were about to picnic there.
As time went on, the proprietors of these cottages (marked on the map of the Ordnance Survey as ‘Grottoes and arbours’) developed the sensible idea of providing in a humble way for the refreshment of the many summer-afternoon visitors to the lovely village, and preserved in my time the tradition of the tea and bun houses with which Hampstead had formerly been too abundantly provided. A humble guild, with no better properties than deal tables and benches, coarse white or coloured ware, of which there used to be great piles, and clean tablecloths for the first comers. The knives, when required, were bone-handled, and blunt; and the spoons—well, sensitive persons used to wash them in the slop-basin, and dry them surreptitiously on the edge of the tablecloth. It was not exactly Frascati’s,[182] but it was a pleasant picture in its way of homely, hearty enjoyment, and the crowning joy of many a girl and boy’s afternoon holiday on Hampstead Heath.
One of them, rather an old boy now, has told me that, after an independent excursus in Bishop’s Wood, a general exploration of the Heath, a game of hide-and-seek with his sisters among the gravel-pits, and a donkey-ride from the Whitestone Pond to the Spaniards and back again, or from the same starting-point round the West Heath to Jack Straw’s Castle and the Whitestone Pond, few things could be more pleasantly suggestive than the fuming chimneys in the hollow of the Vale of Health, and the near sight of the several tables with big family teapots, flanked by heaped-up plates of serviceable slices of bread-and-butter (delicious after the ‘crug’ of Christ’s School), and new-laid eggs, and water-cresses from the spring, which made the general menu of these al-fresco entertainments.
It was not unusual on summer evenings to see the whole space in front of these cottages thronged with respectably-dressed family and other parties taking tea in the open, and enlivening the placid scene with social gaiety.