As the gothic tales of Victorian England wandered the murky past, their readers marched into a smoky future. The wilderness and everything in it was being tamed.
The railway line between Finsbury Park and Highgate was just one battlefront of industrialisation in London. But it was not one we would win. Handed between companies and hampered by World War II, progress ground to a halt in the mid-20th century. The wilderness hit back hard.
Today, Parkland Walk contains what’s left of the railway line. Over three miles and 50 years, sycamore, oak and ash trees have returned to line the path. By night, bats flit overhead – hundreds now pack the abandoned tunnels of nearby Highgate station.
Yet while a local society maintains the flora and British law protects the fauns, there is another and much older force at work – the Parkland Walk spriggan.
Parkland Walk and the will of the wild
Spriggans were originally the invention of Cornish folklore. This one is the creation of sculptor Marilyn Collins – the first and only piece of a planned and scrapped sculpture walk along the trail. In the stories, spriggans would manipulate the elements, kidnap wandering children and send travellers astray. This one lives up to its reputation. The local Friends of the Parkland Walk warn of a creature easy to miss. For three miles, I checked and double checked its reported location, persistently sure I’d gone – or been led – too far.
In the meantime, regular postings reported more ways nature had reclaimed Parkland Walk.
The woodland is young and spreads wilfully, bringing to mind the impetuous characters printed on the pages of gothic pulp. There aren’t many veteran trees – enthusiastic mowing and occasional grass fires caused by passing steam trains held the wilderness in check until 1970, when the line was closed.
Missing along the walk is any sort of lighting. By night, a handful of bat species use this dark highway to travel from the railway tunnels to other nearby nature reserves. Along the way, each bat will eat as many as 3,000 insects.
And in the acid grassland, a particularly rare species of parasitic bee has been able to thrive. The so-called cuckoo bee steals into nests, devours the host’s eggs and leaves its own in their place – much as a spriggan might leave a changeling.
The old world under England
I walked the path east, in the direction of Finsbury Park. After perhaps a mile, the true power of the natural world – and the influence of Parkland Walk’s spriggan guardian – presented itself.
The first in a series of overhead footpaths and disused railway bridges was a pile of dark brick and clustered vines. Street art splattered where the plant life could not reach – or perhaps only where it allowed. In the tunnel, spiders and insects huddled, recovering from the bat attacks of the previous night.
From the sunken path, I found it easy to forget I was walking through a capital city. Say what you will about London, but it does treat its green spaces with a certain sanctity. Maybe because, in the rush to industrialise, London met such a formidable resistance from the wilderness. Or maybe because, in the castle ruins, among the standing stones and in the barrows under England, the old world is only sleeping.
An agent of this old world, the Parkland Walk spriggan, hides under a railway arch at the terminus of the Crouch End platforms.
The Parkland Walk spriggan, guardian of the wilderness
A mischievous prankster cursed by travellers. A wicked kidnapper and producer of changelings. A protector of less powerful fairy folk. Changing perceptions only takes a few years, a couple of tales and, in my own personal circumstances, two premature obituaries.
But in its current shape, given to it by Marilyn Collins in Parkland Walk, the spriggan to me represents that gothic return to nature – something old outlasting something new. The community of Highgate and the Friends of the Parkland Walk, responsible for this strip of green in England’s ever-expanding capital city, could have no better champion.