In Praise of Hampstead Heath
For the last few months Angela and I (and sometimes the kids!) have been taking Saturday morning walks on the Heath. However low one is feeling it has become the ultimate fillip. We walk in the area of the Heath by Kenwood House. I’m reading a biography of Keats currently and he knew it as Caen Wood House.
My mother knew it as Ken Wood House. She loved the Heath and when she could she walked there almost daily – Parliament Hill and the Vale of Health being part of her usual circuit. There was a tree at the end of Lime Walk which she would occasionally visit to mull over some major decision in her life. Unfortunately it was one of the casualties of the October 1987 hurricane.
Angela and I have also fallen in love with the benches on our walks. There was once one at the foot of Kite Hill with the inscription: I was born tomorrow/today I live/yesterday killed me. Sadly it appears to have been moved.
We love the runners, the dogs and their walkers, the young and old couples, the families, and the coffee & croissants at the House… And ‘running into’ friends from HPC!
from Mum’s Memoirs:
The best thing of all about my new home [in Cannon Place] was its closeness to the glory of Hampstead Heath, for in that year a love affair started which lasted for ten years until I left the Garden Flat and moved into my mother’s house [in Thurlow Road] , which sadly was not close enough to the Heath for daily encounters, which are needed to keep a love affair going at passionate pitch. Hardly a day went by in those first years when I would not venture down to the Vale of Health pond, where Shelley is said to have sailed his paper boats, to feed the ducks. I learned to recognize many of the trees, the oaks and beeches, firs and sycamores, silver birches, ashes and limes and many many more. There is a stunning spot on a hill surrounded by cedars, where you glimpse Ken Wood House in the distance, and the temptation to walk across is almost irresistible. There are fine timber benches dotted about at convenient spots for resting or admiring views, most of which have been donated in memory of a loved one who had been a Heath lover. My ambition then was to have my own memorial bench, and I chose a very special spot in full view of what became for me a kind of shrine. This was the most immense and glorious copper beech tree I had ever seen. Its span was more than seventy feet. I told my secrets to this tree, leaning against the stout trunk and pouring out my joys and sorrows. It was a form of praying really, I suppose. Tragedy befell this wonderful tree as a result of the great storm, when it was weakened, losing some of its main branches, and finally had to be felled.