LONDON: The road along which we drove to-day from Herne Hill to Gipsy Hill looked at first sight no different from many another road in south-east London. Solid Victorian houses flanked it on either side and here and there a plane tree leaned over it, slightly forbidding in its gaunt bareness. And then, near the southern end of it we caught sight of its name – Croxted Road. So this was the Crokestrete of medieval times, the winding lane along which, if tradition is to be believed, pilgrims rode on their way from London to Canterbury.
How different from the present one must have been the scene they saw! One imagined them, having made the crossing of the Thames, riding down through Lambeth to Herne Hill, where the herons from which it presumably took its name would be fishing in the vanished river Effra; then on along Croxted Road and up Gipsy Hill, later to become notorious as the haunt of the Norwood Gipsies, by whom Mrs Pepys and George III had their fortunes told, to the great Northwood, only a fragment of which in now standing – Dulwich Wood, on the slopes of Sydenham Hill. Perhaps, before they dropped down to the plains and headed for the North Downs, they saw a sparrow-hawk go dashing through the wood, as one may to-day, or heard, as we did last spring, a turtle-dove purring its message of peace beside the way.
