I reached Cassiobury Park via the Metropolitan line’s Watford branch. The station there is rural in character and it’s just a short walk to the park’s entrance.

Like so many open spaces in and around London Cassiobury was linked to a fabulous mansion belonging to the Earls of Essex. Here is a print of the estate in the eighteenth century. It must have been truly magnificent.

Unfortunately the house, like many others when the world changed radically after the Great War, proved too expensive to maintain and it was demolished in 1927 with many of its fixtures sold. When one thinks that the house was decorated by the likes of Grindling Gibbons and Antonio Verrio its loss is quite considerable, although large part of it were reconstructed in Bedford, New York USA and many of its treasures are spread in museums throughout the world.

Luckily the park survives and has not been a victim to the area’s endemic house building. Comprising over 190 acres it still preserves the monumental avenue which lead to the vanished mansion.

There’s a lovely spread of woodland, lawns and waterways: both the river Gade and the Grand Union canal wind their way through the park.

The western part of the park consists of Whippendell wood, a tract of ancient forest consisting mainly of oak, ash, beech and silver birch trees. Here one leaves the civilised part of Cassiobury behind and enters into a wild wood like that described in ‘The Wind in the Willows’.

The wood gives way westwards to large fields of corn bounded by dense forests.

I could have carried walking until goodness knows when but decided to reach urbanity by cutting across a narrow path leading to a delightful hamlet called Little Green.

Here I met a horse who was tossing an empty container up and down – clearly he was getting irritated by the fact that none of his human servants had refilled it with his oats!

Passing the remains of a little pond

I eventually reached a housing estate at the end of which a bus returned me to Watford, this time to its ‘junction’ station and homewards.