Before Finchley became the classic suburbia that it is today; it was a common and before that a wood.
Swallowed by the behemoth that is London the capital sought to remake the landscape into its own sprawling image. A palimpsest of ‘A’ and ‘B’ roads, high streets, the all important transport systems that prevent an isolate reversion to previosity and mnemonic regression. Progress, like entropy, is only supposed to flow one way.
However, like those re-used manuscripts traces of it’s past remain.
Apart from the corralled woods and waterways, a small network of paths criss-cross the borough; evidence that those feet in ancient times did indeed wander well-trod paths about their business.
My latest walk took me along such a walkway from the old hamlet of Totteridge south to what was the hamlet now known as Church End, and the church of St. Mary after which it is named.
My starting point was the entrance to Church Walk by Swan Lane Open Space. This small park was previously the site of some gravel pits that were turned into this open space in the early part fo the 20th century. Given the rather less glamorous name of ‘The Pits’ these excavations remind us that:
“Much of Finchley lies on boulder clay. Between this and the underlying London clay is a layer of gravel. The best conditions for early settlement were where this lay exposed: thus Nether Street, an ancient local road, links the sites of old farms along the gravel line. elsewhere, near the gravel, were the three hamlets that formed Finchley’s earliest population centres now fully connected by 20th century building.”
(The London Encyclopaedia, pub Macmillan 2008)
Giant redwood trees line one side of Church Walk’s entrance, whilst en route I was rubbing shoulders with the more conventional flowering elder, holly, chestnut and sycamore.
The walk is bisected by by a number of avenues and roads belonging to the newer suburban ontological layer.
This walk yields a memory of the deep topology that once ran across both wood and common.
A number of other old paths still intersect with this path before it joins the northern edge of Nether Street where the surface strata roll back to reveal the gravel which also gives name to the hill running down by the side of St. Philip's Church to the south of Church End.
Nether Street meanders left, right, up and over rolling hills defying the linear planning of its suburban branches. At its southern extremity as it turns east to re-join Ballard’s Lane my eye was drawn to a building entitled ‘St Ronan’, who is an Irish Saint who gave it all up to become a hermit in Brittany. In one story he is accused of sorcery and lycanthropy and proved his innocence by taming two wild dogs. I’m immediately reminded that the dog has the association with the ‘Nether’ realm or the world below - through three-headed Cerberus and Anubis the jackel-headed god who escorts the dead into the Hall of Judgement. Finchley was not a law-abiding place but was notorious for its highway men and brigands whose ‘manor’ it was until the foot patrols of the early 19th century saw them off.
Such walkways, green and pleasant now, must have made going to church an ordeal!
Listening carefully - the whispering leaves can be heard reciting the rosary echoing the urgent petitions for protection from lips long ago.
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