Cycle Rides Round London

by Charles G. Harper

It cannot be said that the hamlet of Frogmoor End, which succeeds King’s Langley, is beautiful, neither is Apsley End precisely a poet’s dream. They are quite modern settlements, helping to spoil this once wild and lonely district of Boxmoor. There is a Boxmoor village now, and a railway station beside the road, named after it, but of actual barren moor there is but little.

On the skirts of what was once the moor, we turn to the right, and in a mile and a half reach the little town of Hemel Hempstead, through its suburb, Marlowes. The town is mentioned in Domesday Book as “Hamelamestead,” and the country folk call it “Hampstead,” instead of “Hempstead,” to this day. Like many of these little Hertfordshire towns, it is somewhat scrubby and out at elbows, and is not sufficiently removed from London to be altogether provincial. Its streets are steep and run in perplexing and unlooked-for directions, and its church tower has the characteristic Hertfordshire leaden extinguisher spire developed to an altogether surprising height and tenuity.

WATER END.

But if Hemel Hempstead be not particularly inviting to the cyclist, at least the road that runs thence to Great Gaddesden has supreme charms. Hitherto we have been on high roads; here we are on byways bordered by parks and picturesque hamlets. It is but two miles from the town we have just left, through Piccott’s End and Water End, to Great Gaddesden. At the beginning of Water End there is an exquisitely beautiful bit that Corot himself would have loved to paint; where a group of tall, bushy Lombardy poplars hangs over the old bridge that carries the road over the river Gade, and gives a lovely foreground to a view of an ancient two-gabled, white-faced farmstead amid fertile water-meadows. To lead one’s cycle on to the grass beside the water and to lie here in the sunshine of a hot summer’s afternoon, lulled by the rippling of the stream and the purring of the wind among the poplars, is a delight.

The road now runs past the park of Gaddesden Place, with the river on the right, and crossing another bridge with more poplars, climbs a little rise by a few cottages, and thus, leaving Water End, comes in half a mile to the very, very small village of Great Gaddesden. How almost invariably it is the case that places called “Great” are really microscopically small! The church and village lie off to the left, in the level “dene” beside the Gade, whence the name derives; secluded, unspotted from the world. It is an interesting old church, full of monuments to Halseys and their relatives by marriage: all, to judge from their epitaphs, the salt of the earth, which must have lost its savour now they are gone. The large pieces of pudding-stone that crop up in the churchyard attract attention in this part of the country.

Leaving the village, make straight ahead across the road by which you have come, and charge up the hillside lane as far as you can. Then get off and walk for a quarter of a mile, looking back a moment to where Great Gaddesden nestles in the valley. The summit of this hill reached, the lane winds in pretty and shady fashion for a mile, and then descends to a lonely hollow whence lanes run in three directions. Fortunately, there is a sign-post here. Follow the lane to Markyate. It is not at first a very pleasing lane, being rather plentifully strewed with large, smooth, round flints, the “plums” detached from their native pudding-stone; really looking like big kidney potatoes—but harder. Happily, they soon grow fewer, and leave us free to enjoy the descent through the wooded dell leading to the lodge and gates of Beechwood Park. Do not take either of the roads to right or left, but the narrow lane ahead, which, although narrow, affords excellent riding.

Flamstead is a mile and a half away. One quarter of a mile walk uphill, and then the going is quite level on to the village, situated above a hollow where the little river Verlam or Ver runs, and therefrom originally named Verlamstead. It is quite a small place, with a large church, whose tower has the usual Hertfordshire extinguisher spirelet and is daubed with plaster and bolstered and tied up with red brick debased buttresses and iron tie-rods; and altogether, although old, is exactly like the kind of thing designed nowadays by the very latest school of unconventional, nightmare architects.

Leaving the church on the right, the road bends to the left, descends steeply, and then, turning to the right, joins that broad highway, the old Holyhead road. Friars’ Wash is the name of this junction with that old highway. It was a place where in days of old, when the river Ver ran strong, and roads were not so good as they are now, both friars and other wayfarers occasionally had an involuntary bath.