The Fields Beneath Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Castle Tavern tea-garden was dredged. No date, even conjectural, was assigned to it, and writers commenting on it not long after seem to have imagined it as belonging to something akin to a Spanish galleon, or a mythic vessel of some remote but resplendent golden age not locatable in actual chronology. One should perhaps qualify statements about ‘whole navies’ having once come up river as far as Kentish Town with the observation that, in distant times, ‘ships’ (like ‘rivers’) came in modest sizes. It seems however likely that the Romans sailed their boats up the Fleet: in the foundations of St Pancras Old Church (early mediaeval, but known to be on the site of an older building or a series of them) lie courses of Roman brick and fragments of their tiles. So perhaps the church, like St Paul’s Cathedral itself, in whose gift it was for so long, lies on the site of a pre-Christian temple. It was confidently asserted in the eighteenth century that the bones of an elephant, brought to Britain by the Romans ‘to frighten the barbarians’, had been dug up not far from the church; but twentieth-century scholarship, with rather more accurate perception of the aeons of time that lie behind us, is more inclined to regard these as the bones of some prehistoric mammoth, overtaken by death while seeking a drink at the crackling, frozen verge of the Ice Age Fleet. Even further back in time there are indications that the whole area was covered by the sea: an unsuccessful boring for water in the nineteenth century got down to beds of carbonised shells.
    Returning to a more measurable time-scale, the facts are these: one or more main tributaries of the Fleet rise near the Vale of Health on Hampstead Heath and flow in one stream via Hampstead Ponds and South End Green along Fleet Road to Gospel Oak. This stream then proceeds due south through west Kentish Town, crossing Prince of Wales Road just below Angler’s Lane (the derivation is obvious) and then continues in a slightly more eastwards direction till it crosses the lower part of Kentish Town Road below the Castle Inn, at almost the same place where the Regent’s Canal has run since 1820. But just before making this cross to the eastern side of the road it is joined by its other main tributary, a stream which rises in the grounds of Ken Wood, and flows down through Highgate Ponds (which are old reservoirs) on the edge of Parliament Hill. This stream veers east under Highgate Road at about the level of St Alban’s Road where it is joined by the rivulet of the Brookfield brook: the end houses of St Alban’s Road stand in what was once a sizeable pond, utilised in the late eighteenth century for a gentleman’s ornamental water garden. It continues due south, then veers west again back under Highgate Road at the particularly bleak point where two large factories now stand right on the road. Behind them, somewhere in the waste of railway lands and abandoned scraps of pre-urban Kentish Town fields, it picks up another little stream coming from the north and then continues on its way through west Kentish Town to join with the Hampstead branch.
    Once joined, somewhere near the railway bridge which spans the main road like a portcullis at the southern end of present-day Kentish Town, the enlarged stream proceeds determinedly onwards following the curve of St Pancras Way – or, to be more accurate, the line of St Pancras Way still follows the curving route of the pack-horse track that once followed the bank of the stream. It passes close beside St Pancras Old Church, which was built either on a natural hillock above the marshy watercourse or on land specially embanked there to lift the building clear of the spring floods. It then continues on, down under the complex of railway bridges north of the main line stations, down past King’s Cross where Bagnigge Wells once were, through Clerkenwell and on – its name now transiently the Olde-bourne – down Farringdon Street, past