The Lake District: Sca Fell via Lord's Rake

Following on from our successful ascent of Helvellyn via Striding Edge late last year, Alex and I decided to make the most of our time in the Lake District and go up another mountain. After some discussion which involved checking the list of Wainwright Fells and buying another Ordnance Survey map, we decided on Sca Fell – England’s second-highest mountain. This would involve a considerably longer morning drive from Ambleside before we could start walking, for our chosen setting-off point for this mountain would be Wasdale which is on the western side of Lakeland (Ambleside is reasonably central, which makes it a good base for exploring the Lake District; the problem is that the OS’s 1:25,000 Explorer series, which is better for walking than the 1:50,000 Landranger series, has four maps that cover the area).

Another early start, but our journey took longer than expected. After the fun of driving along the Kirkstone pass the previous day, Alex (for we went in his car!) now had two other passes, Wrynose and Hardknott, to look forward to. Alas, the former was closed due to ice on the road so we had to divert to the south, actually leaving the Lake District National Park in order to get to Wasdale via the outskirts of Broughton-in-Furness. Our journey ended with a drive along the shores of Wast Water, not a lake either of us had visited before but which, we learned via the Internet, is the deepest lake in England.

Not long after nine, we parked up at the National Trust’s Wasdale car park and enjoyed a breakfast of tea and bacon rolls from the food van. While chatting with one of the volunteers (who didn’t charge us for parking after I’d claimed – truthfully as it happens – to be an NT member who didn’t have his card with him), we learned that a few days previously, a group of students had had to be rescued after one of their number had tried to go up Scafell Pike naked. Now, I’ve heard of people doing some crazy stuff in the mountains – extreme ironing springs to mind – but this one really took the biscuit, especially given the time of year. Suitably clad, we set off.

Before we go any further, though, a couple of points of order…

Firstly, is it Sca Fell or Scafell? Usage varies, with the Ordnance Survey going for the former and some guidebooks, most notably Wainwright, preferring the latter. My use of the former is purely a matter of personal preference.

Second, why is it that of the peaks in the Scafell range, the highest one is called Scafell Pike (implying that it’s not the highest)? Wainwright explains…

“When men first named the mountains, the whole of the high mass south of Sty Head was known as Scaw Fell; later, as the work of the dalesfolk took them more and more onto the heights and closer identification became necessary, they applied the name to the mountain that seemed to them the greatest, the other summits in the range … being referred to collectively as the Pikes of Scaw Fell.”

So it was a case of mistaken identity – the tallest peak did not appear so. It’s actually true that from some vantage-points, Sca Fell does look like it’s a bit taller than it near neighbour Scafell Pike which is England’s tallest mountain. For the record, Sca Fell is 3,162ft/964m and Scafell Pike is 3,210ft/978m (I’m using Wainwright for the imperial measurements and the OS for metric).

(We’d hiked up Scafell Pike, years ago, which was another reason for choosing to do Sca Fell this time as it would be a new one for us; if memory serves, the ascent of Scafell Pike had been done in the summer and involved walking up from Great Langdale and camping overnight somewhere in the hills. Clearly this has not resonated with us as much as the youthful lunacy that was the winter overnight camp for Helvellyn.)

The climb was gentle at first but got gradually steeper. Our well-maintained path (the National Trust at work!) followed the Lingmell Gill, one of the streams that flows down into Wast Water. This splits into two paths, one of which goes up to Sty Head and the other to Mickledore, both high passes from which the summit of Scafell Pike can be reached. For Sca Fell we wanted the Mickledore option, but we would be turning off before we got that high.

Our turn-off, which did not look at all inviting, was a scree-slope from which we would be able to access Lord’s Rake, a steep gully which passes under the summit plateau (which cannot be ascended directly without proper climbing equipment). Now I am no fan of scree at the best of times and I did struggle to get as far as the entrance to Lord’s Rake, and once I got that far I was wondering whether this was really such a good idea.

During a short break to allow for the consumption of some cofftea and a Mars bar, I took stock of what we were about to do. The gully was full of loose rock, and amid a few discarded pieces of kit the animal skeleton close to the entrance did not bode well (dog or fox, probably, although quite what a fox would be doing at that height is anyone’s guess).

But onwards and upwards! In such cases I am more than happy to bring up the rear of any party, the result being that Alex was able to get some pretty good pictures of yours truly scrambling on hands and knees, apprehensive about whether the next bit of rock I got hold of would be too loose to support me.

It ended at a narrow gap between two rocky outcrops – or so we’d thought, for after that the route (I struggle to dignify it with the word ‘path’) descended and then ascended to another, equally narrow, gap. My descent was not pretty but I take heart from Wainwright (who I read afterwards), who states that “where boots cannot gain a purchase on the sliding stones and polished rocks, other methods of locomotion may be adopted, especially when descending. It is no disgrace even for stalwart men to come down here on their bottoms”.

Lord’s Rake – you may not be surprised to learn that we came up with some very rude alternative names for it – is meant to go up, down, up again, down again and then up one more time before you make it out onto the open fell. I’m not exactly sure what we did, for after dropping down from the second peak we ended up doing a steep climb up an icy gully to get out onto the plateau. Wainwright (again) says of Lord’s Rake that “one’s fellwalking education is not complete until its peculiar delights and horrors have been experienced”, so at the very least I can consider myself educated as a result of this experience.

It was with relief that I staggered – on two feet, now – up onto the plateau. The summit cairn was easy enough to locate, and unlike Helvellyn the day before we had the place to ourselves. 

Celebrating with cofftea and a swig from the hip-flask, I could see across to the slightly higher and much more crowded summit of Scafell Pike – clearly more walkers prefer the glory that goes with standing at England’s highest point to the relative solitude of the second-highest! Looking east, we could see the sea and the Isle of Man. To the east, Bow Fell and Crinkle Crags (the Lake District’s sixth and seventeenth-highest peaks, going by Wainwright) stood out. Helvellyn, which is to the north-east, can’t be seen from Sca Fell because the summit of Scafell Pike is in the way.

What next? Alas, a ridge walk over to Scafell Pike was out of the question, for the Sca Fell plateau ends with Broad Stand, a very steep rocky wall which means that accessing the Mickledore pass (from which there’s a route up to Scafell Pike) is much easier said than done. Descent – considerable descent – is involved before you can walk up to Mickledore. From the plateau, we took the path down to Foxes Tarn (more of a pond than anything else) and then down another gully to get us to the path that goes up to Mickledore. At some point there, we had our lunch with a very nice view to the south-east.

We continued up a combination of grass and scree (albeit not as bad as the scree that took us up to Lord’s Rake) and eventually reached Mickledore. This pass, some 2,755ft/840m up, stands directly below Broad Strand, that steep cliff and theoretical direct route between the two highest mountains in the country which has been described as ‘extremely dangerous’ by no less an authority than the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team (Wainwright never attempted it, stating that his disappointment at not doing so was “amply compensated by the pleasure of going on living”). From Mickledore, we had a good view across to Lord’s Rake – had we really done that?

Descending back down to Wasdale involved plenty more scree but thankfully it wasn’t long before we were back on more solid ground for a downward walk with views over Wast Water in the fading light. Back at the car park, we decided that a quick visit to the nearby Wasdale Head Inn (a well-known hang-out for climbers and fellwalkers) would be in order before our return to Ambleside.

The Lake District: Helvellyn via Striding Edge

To the Lake District, for a couple of days of walking with Alex on a cold but dry weekend late last year. It had been a while since I went up to Lakeland – I used to go there quite a few times when I was in the Ventures, and this time there was a sense of unfinished business. We used to do a lot of hiking, or fellwalking if you prefer – Great Langdale was a favourite, as I recall – but I always felt, looking back, that we’d missed something.

Helvellyn is the third-highest mountain in the Lake District, which also makes it the third-highest mountain in England. Located on a ridge between Thirlmere and Ullswater, there are various routes up it and we did a couple, but we never did what is regarded as the classic way up. I’m talking about Striding Edge. 

If you approach Helvellyn from the east (ie. if you hike up from Ullswater), there are two ridges that lead onto the summit – Swirral Edge to the north and Striding Edge to the south. The latter is an increasingly narrow ridge which involves much scrambling before the final ascent; a favourite among walkers who fancy a challenge, but it can get very dangerous when the weather turns on you.

(The dangers of walking at altitude in the Lake District are nothing new, by the way. There have been a number of fatalities in the vicinity of Helvellyn, the earliest known one being Charles Gough, an otherwise obscure artist who fell off Striding Edge in April 1805; his body was found three months later with his dog, Foxie – his only companion on his final walk – watching over him. A Lakeland version of Greyfriars Bobby, perhaps, although many accounts of Gough’s demise – which inspired poetry by Scott and Wordsworth, no less – omitted contemporary speculation that Foxie had survived by eating her master’s remains.)

Alfred Wainwright, that legendary fellwalker who casts a long shadow over the area thanks to his seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells which remains the standard work of reference for walking in the Lake District despite having been written decades ago, described the ascent of Helvellyn via Striding Edge as “a classic ascent recorded and underlined in the diaries of all fellwalkers”. It was Wainwright who gave his name to the Wainwright Fells, a list of 214 peaks which are the ones he described in the afore-mentioned series of books. Climbing all of them is the aim of many a fellwalker who loves walking the Lake District, just like those who like to ‘bag’ the Munros up in Scotland. We managed a few Wainwrights back in the day (Helm Crag, Scafell Pike, the Old Man of Coniston, various of the Langdale Pikes, etc), although no-one was keeping score.

The closest we got to Striding Edge was a morning ascent of Helvellyn via Swirral Edge which, looking back, was ridiculous to the point of being downright dangerous. Alex, myself and a couple of friends thought it would be fun to walk up to Red Tarn, the small lake located underneath Helvellyn on its eastern flank, camp overnight and ascend Helvellyn itself in the morning. This was undertaken during the week between Christmas and New Year (a favourite time of ours for going up to the Lakes, what with there being no sixth-form or university commitments).

It was as mad as it sounds. Camping overnight at an altitude of over 2,000 feet in December was an ordeal in itself (it turned out that my supposedly four-season sleeping-bag had its limits) and in the morning, after a quick breakfast of tea and Ready Brek (we’d taken a petrol-stove with us) we packed up our kit and went for Swirral Edge. We chose that one purely because we were carrying full kit (the plan was to end up on the Thirlmere side) and Striding Edge would have involved some significant doubling-back on ourselves.

I’ve never been exactly sure what happened next but instead of the expected path, we ended up scrambling up a steep scree-slope before having to do some actual climbing (and no, we did not have a rope with us). At one point I was struggling to get a hand-hold and the only thing I could firmly grasp was a ledge which Matt, who was above me, was using as a foot-hold. If he’d shuffled a couple of inches over to his left, the result wouldn’t have been pretty. When I reminded him of this a while ago, he referred to it as ‘that time we nearly died’. He wasn’t joking … much.

A couple of years later, Alex and I were back, this time on a day-walk up from Ullswater, and once again we declined Striding Edge, mainly because we wanted to see where we’d gone wrong; after making it to Red Tarn we followed a fairly straightforward path up Swirral Edge; the only scrambling was to get to the summit plateau itself. Obviously, we’d missed the path in a big way.

So we never did do Striding Edge. Over the years, it occasionally rankled – there was a sense that, although we had stood on the summit of Helvellyn on several occasions, we’d not done it justice. We did plan to do it a couple of years ago, before my fortieth birthday, but in the event we ended up heading back to the Lakes late last year, shortly after I’d turned forty-one.

After a night in an Ambleside B&B (itself followed by a pint or three in the Golden Rule, our new favourite Lake District pub), we set off early (before the designated breakfast time, although the B&B-owner had kindly left the cereal out for us). One morning drive via the Kirkstone Pass later, we were parked up at Glenridding (one of two villages from which you can hike up to Striding Edge, Patterdale being the other) and on the path before 8am.

Some things had not changed; as we were sorting out our kit – sandwiches, waterproof jackets, a flask of tea, binoculars, Ordnance Survey map and the like – a couple in the car next to us were equipping themselves with much less kit than us, their clear intention being fellrunning. That’s never been our speed; as they were talking about making sure they had one of those water-bottles that’s got a rubber tube so you can have a drink without breaking your stride, Alex and I were asking each other whether we’d remembered the hip-flask, and who had the knife to slice up the block of Christmas cake we had with us!

Ullswater was covered in mist as we climbed out of the valley. It was cold, but it was a clear day, and other than the mist the views were wonderful. I’d been worried about the weather but, to be honest, we couldn’t have picked a better day for a hike if we’d tried. With a couple of stops on the way, made good time getting up to Birkhouse Moor, following which the path levels out and we were rewarded with a view of the Helvellyn summit in front of us, flanked by the two ridges and with the often-overlooked Catstye Cam to the right (“If Catstycam stood alone, remote from its fellows, it would be one of the finest peaks in Lakeland” – Wainwright again). 

We stopped for a break at the Hole-in-the-Wall, a gap in the drystone wall which marks the start of Striding Edge (from there, a separate path runs down to Red Tarn, this being the path we’d taken that time we camped out overnight). The Christmas cake, good walking food that, was duly sliced up and washed down with the tea from the flask. I’d made it black, as I know from experience that the metal makes the milk taste funny, although as the flask in question has been used for coffee many times it gave the tea a certain taste – from there on, we took to calling it ‘cofftea’.

Striding Edge, which is just under a mile long, starts off quite pleasantly with a well-marked path to the right of the ridge itself. This gradually changes as the ridge sharpens, with the path sometimes switching to the left of the high point and sometimes leaving the walker with no option but to walk (or scramble) along the frost-coated top, with views of the Helevllyn summit ahead. We were most certainly not alone, for there were people who’d come up from Patterdale as well as Glenridding (the two paths meet at the Hole-in-the-Wall); such is the allure of Striding Edge that when the weather’s nice (which it was), it is very popular.

For me, the hardest part was at the end of the ridge where you have to descend – awkwardly – before scrambling up a rocky path that leads onto the summit itself. Part-way up, there was a great view to be had of the now-completed ridge itself, and as we approached the summit we stopped briefly at the memorial to poor old Charles Gough (who was just 21 when he died).

The summit itself – the shelter and the cairn which marks the highest point (3,118 feet, or 950 metres) – was busy. As well as our fellow-walkers who’d come up Striding Edge, there were a couple of groups of students and even a few mountain-bikers who’d come up from the (considerably less arduous) Thirlmere side. Having admired the view, we had our lunch at the shelter and Alex took the cyclists’ group photo for them by the trig-point. The hip-flask came out for a celebratory swig, as it always had done years ago (the one thing that’s changed there is that we used to put blended Scotch in it, and now it’s single malt).

Getting down via Swirral Edge was something of a scramble, albeit nothing like the upward one we had done years ago. Looking down from the path, we could see the steep scree-slope that we’d ascended before, including a near-vertical climb to get to the path! What had we been thinking? Down by Red Tarn, we tried and failed to work out exactly where we’d camped before heading back to the car at Glenridding.

Back in the comfort of an Ambleside pub that evening, we plotted our next move. We’d allowed for two days in the Lakes, in case the first day wasn’t good weather-wise, but it had been a fine day and there was another one forecast. What to do next? How about another Wainwright Fell, preferably another of the higher ones, elsewhere in the Lake District? I bought an aerial map that marks the Wainwrights in height order (Helvellyn being number three). It turned out that we’d actually ‘bagged’ more Wainwrights than we had thought, for although by dropping down from Swirral Edge to Red Tarn we had not ascended Catstye Cam (number ten), we had unknowingly included number 78 on the way up, for Wainwright had included Birkstone Moor, that plateau before Striding Edge, as a fell in its own right!

Anyway, after some discussion we decided that the following day we would head west and attempt Sca Fell; having done England’s third-highest mountain, we figured that we might as well top that by going for the second-highest. But that’s another story… 

That's no castle, it's a sham

Bath is surrounded by hills, and if you look up at the hills to the east from the Abbey you may be able to make out a castle on the horizon. It’s not really a castle – or rather, it’s a castle in name only.

The eighteenth century was the time when Bath had its second heyday (the first having been in Roman times) as the spa town of choice for the great and good. Much of the modern city was built then, including the architectural gems that are The Circus and the Royal Crescent. It was also a time for the building of follies – buildings intended solely for decoration, and often built to look like they were older than they actually were. The ‘castle’ above Bath is such a building.

It is a sham by name as well as by nature, for its name is the Sham Castle, and it was built in 1762 at the orders of Ralph Allen, a man who had much to do with the building of Georgian Bath for it was he who owned the quarries from which Bath Stone – the honey-coloured oolitic limestone which was the principal building-material for Bath and which gives the city, a World Heritage Site, its distinctive appearance – was taken. Ralph Allen was (also) the man who put up the money for the Royal Mineral Water Hospital (now the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases), and who had Prior Park built in the hills to the south-east; both of those buildings, as well as much else of Georgian Bath, were designed by John Wood the Elder, considered to be one of the finest architects of his day.

The Sham Castle is not one of John Wood’s creations – in fact, it was built several years after his death. Like quite a few of his moneyed contemporaries, Ralph Allen apparently wanted to improve the view from his house (his town-house in Bath in this particular case) and so commissioned this folly to be built on the horizon. Nowadays, it is on the Bath Skyline Walk, a six-mile walk around the hills and valleys to the east and south-east of Bath itself (maybe I should set myself the task of walking it when the weather gets better). On one of my many trips to Bath, I decided to go and take a closer look.

Yes it was January and so somewhat muddy, but up I went anyway, through a kissing-gate and along the path through a field, so steep that steps had been put there. Before the castle itself I came across a bunker of some sort, brick not concrete, in which were the remnants of a fire and a few empty beer-bottles. And, then, just beyond the bunker through the trees, I saw it.

It – the Sham Castle of Bath – consists of a screen wall with a central arch (pointed, not round) flanked by two three-storey round towers and, at either end, two two-storey square towers. That, really, is all there is to it – its purpose was to look like a castle on a hill for those who, like Ralph Allen, could be bothered to look up from the city centre.

One of the windows has an inscription noting that the Sham Castle was restored in 1921, at which point it became the property of the City of Bath (a borough since the time of Alfred the Great and a city without a cathedral for, historically important as Bath Abbey is, it has never been a cathedral although the local diocese is called Bath & Wells). 

For some reason I had thought that the Sham Castle might have an inner staircase enabling one to climb it, but on closer inspection I found that not to be the case; round the back, that part that was not intended to be seen, the two square towers look as though they once had entrances that have long been bricked up (probably when the restoration job of 1921 was done). It looks as though this may have been the case with the inner towers as well, although all that remains there is a small door at the bottom of one of them, and that was locked. 

I don’t doubt that, given a decent pair of climbing-shoes and sufficient ability, you could find enough finger-holds and toe-holds in the brickwork where the mortar has worn away to enable you to climb up the outside, and I equally don’t doubt that someone at some time has done just that; had I been fifteen or so years younger and a couple of stone lighter, I might have been tempted to have a go myself.

But I contented myself with squelching through the mud, walking under the central arch and checking out the view of Bath; somewhat obscured, for there was plenty of mist in the valley of the Avon that day, but I could just about make out the Abbey. Another folly visited, I then made my way down to the city.

The Capital Ring: summing-up

So what to do after finishing the Capital Ring? Write about it, of course – for The Archer, our local volunteer-run newspaper here in East Finchley for which I have been writing for the past half-a-dozen years. Appropriate, really, for I only found out about the Capital Ring by virtue of living in East Finchley which is on the route. My write-up, which made it onto the back page, can be found here:

http://www.the-archer.co.uk/archive/2017/2017May12.pdf

The Capital Ring: South Kenton to East Finchley

To South Kenton on a clear Friday morning in February, starting on the last part of my Capital Ring walk by the Windermere, a big pub by the station that looked like it was built in the Thirties – as did every other building in the surrounding area. No time for a drink, though, for Dad and I had some walking to do. Besides, it wasn’t open at that time of morning.

Before long, we’d passed through our first park of the day – Preston Park – and crossed Preston Road, crossing over the Metropolitan Line as we did so. 

One street later and it was under the Jubilee Line and over the Wealdstone Brook, a tributary of the River Brent. The next street led us to a footpath which turned onto an open space called Fryent Country Park; it would be grass paths for the next couple of miles, and very muddy some of them turned out to be. 

We climbed Barn Hill, and before entering the trees turned for a stunning view of suburban north-west London and the ridge of countryside behind it (marking the borderland between Middlesex and Hertfordshire). Of particular note on this vista were the church atop Harrow-on-the-Hill, Bentley Priory, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital and the Edgwarebury Hotel.

At the top of Barn Hill was a trig point (282 feet up) and a pond adorned with signs advising that fishing and camping are not allowed in the vicinity. 

A dead and hollowed-out tree provided a perching-post for ring-necked parakeets; these pale green and rather loud creatures are relatively new additions to London’s bird scene. Native to India, they’ve been recorded in south-eastern England since the late Sixties and there is a nice story about how they got here, something about the first pair being released by either Mick Jagger or Jimi Hendrix (who for a time lived on Brook Street in Mayfair, coincidentally next-door to where George Frideric Handel had lived over two centuries beforehand), although it’s more likely that the earliest ones escaped from private collections. Either way, they’ve firmly established themselves here now and they seem to do well despite the weather!

Moving downhill, we crossed a track signposted as Eldestrete, an old path which according to Colin Saunders in his book is reckoned to be of pre-Roman vintage and “was used by pilgrims to St Alban’s shrine”. That book, by the way (as I may have mentioned before, it’s published in association with the Ordnance Survey and is simply called The Capital Ring) has proved to be very useful, especially at points where the Capital Ring signage may be damaged or not immediately apparent. Crossing the A4140, we continued through Fryent Country Park which is a place that Dad and I have both driven past many times but never stopped to explore. That, of course, is what something like the Capital Ring enables people to do; it connects places which people may have heard of or passed on a regular basis but haven’t looked at further. There is, of course, always more to London – maybe I should qualify that by saying Greater London – than people think; Samuel Johnson was, of course, right when he pointed out that “when a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford”.

We got another good viewpoint from the top of Gotfords Hill (just over 200 feet; no trig point this time). After walking alongside and through gaps in hedgerows, we hit suburbia again in the form of Kingsbury which has a rather interesting church; St Andrew’s was built in 1847 and was reckoned to be one of London’s finest churches but it was built in the West End (Wells Street to be precise). By the early twentieth century, falling congregation numbers led to the church being closed and it was threatened with demolition. What saved it was suburban development to the north – the growing suburb of Kingsbury was turning out to be too big for its church, so a solution was proposed. Between 1931 and 1933, the church was taken apart stone by stone and rebuilt in Kingsbury. We turned left just after the church, heading along Old Church Lane which afforded views of the ‘old’ St Andrew’s church through the trees (it’s now a Romanian Orthodox church).

Our next goal was the Welsh Harp, alias Brent Reservoir, a place where I’ve gone birdwatching several times. It was here that we crossed a local authority boundary for the last time on the walk, leaving the London Borough of Brent and entering the London Borough of Barnet. The reservoir – which gets the ‘Welsh Harp’ name from a pub that used to stand nearby, dates back to the early nineteenth century when the River Brent was dammed to supply water for the Regent’s Canal; as well as a popular wildlife-watching venue, it’s also well-known as a sailing centre. We stopped for lunch there, looking out onto the reservoir with the sound of the North Circular making itself known in the background (more of that to come). Bird-wise, we saw black-headed gulls (lots of those), coots, moorhens, tufted ducks (lots of those, too), a lone lesser-black-backed gull, pochards, gadwalls, mallards, geese of the Canada and greylag varieties and mute swans.

After the Welsh Harp we crossed the A5 – part of Watling Street, the old Roman road which I’d previously encountered in its south-of-the-river guise as the A2 on an earlier Capital Ring section. Then it was over the M1 and into Hendon, skirting the back-streets just to the north of Brent Cross Shopping Centre which celebrated its fortieth birthday last year (it’s never been the same since they got rid of the fountain). We were still walking in bright sunshine but parts of the sky looked ominously grey. A subway took us under the A41 and not long afterwards a footbridge took us over the Northern Line (Edgware branch) – and from the footbridge you can see Brent Cross station, supremely ill-suited for access to the shopping centre of the same name but it should be noted that the station pre-dates the centre by over fifty years.

 The footbridge led into Hendon Park, and it was here that Dad’s Capital Ring odyssey came to an end, he having started the walk after me but from a point further back. 

I would therefore be doing the final few miles back to East Finchley on my own. For part of this I would be doing so within earshot of the North Circular, a ring road that dates back to the Twenties and which “has the dubious distinction of being the noisiest road in Britain” (according to Colin Saunders); it has never ceased to amaze me that people will voluntarily (I presume they do so voluntarily) pay good money for and live in the houses that line it. Thankfully, the Capital Ring goes through parks for the most part of this stretch.

First up was Brent Park, a narrow park running alongside the River Brent which was deliberately left undeveloped when this part of North London was built up, just in case the river flooded. There’s a pond called The Decoy (so called because it used to be used to lure ducks for the purpose of capturing them) and I’m pleased to report that the flowers were out at this time of year. 

At the end of the park is the point at which the Brent is formed from the merger of Dollis Brook (which rises in Moat Mount Open Space) and Mutton Brook (which starts out as an underground stream in Cherry Tree Wood in East Finchley). These are followed by the ten-mile Dollis Valley Greenwalk which could be a future walk, should I fancy something a little shorter next time.

Following Mutton Brook and the afore-mentioned Dollis Valley Greenwalk, I passed under the North Circ and through a small patch of open space sandwiched between the former and Hampstead Garden Suburb, a settlement established in the early twentieth century by Dame Henrietta Barnett, a philanthropist who wanted to set up a community which included people from all social backgrounds (but no pub), a social experiment which lasted for a couple of decades before economic reality took over and the Garden Suburb became one of the most affluent parts of North London. 

I skirted along its northern edge, briefly touching on Addison Way before passing through Northway Gardens and Lyttleton Playing Fields, the latter of which afforded a view of the Garden Suburb’s skyline, with the spire of St Jude’s and the dome of the Free Church bookending the girls’ grammar school named after Dame Henrietta; that, by the way, is where I did part of my teacher training, thirteen years ago.

From the playing-fields I emerged onto Norrice Lea, a stretch of road with a primary school at the end. This was familiar to me, for last year I did my bit for democracy by being the man in charge of a modest-looking portacabin close by the gate that served as the local area’s polling station in the EU referendum. After crossing the A1, it was time for the final stretch – up through a couple of streets of very nice (and very expensive) houses that count as being in the Garden Suburb even though they have the N2 postcode which denotes East Finchley. This took me to Edmund’s Walk, a close which has at the end a narrow path which leads to The Causeway, the footpath leading to the back entrance to East Finchley station which was where I started on my Capital Ring walk almost two years ago.

I stood there briefly as some people walked past, going to or from the station oblivious to the modest green Capital Ring signs that had caught my attention and sent me off on a 78-mile walk, a circle which I had now closed. What, I wondered, would I do next as a walking project? The London Loop, perhaps, or maybe the Thames Path? Or perhaps a series of shorter walks? First things first, though; I’d walked nine miles that day, and I needed to sit and put my feet up while having a cup of tea that didn’t have the metallic taste that comes with drinking it out of a flask. So I went home.