The area of woodland to the north of Highbury Park was once laid out as gardens for Highbury Hall. Survey maps from then and now show several looping paths in an area of scattered plantings, a pond, a viewing platform and some small buildings. Some of the paths seem to be as old as the Hall, because they are set out on the First Edition Ordnance Survey maps, and have a partial resemblance to Edward Milner’s garden plans included in the 1878 architectural drawings for the Hall. For all we know there might have been older paths of which no trace remains. But since the First Edition OS map is the oldest available record, it is my starting point for an attempt to retrace whatever remains of those landcape features.
The image above is a portion of the map, on which I have traced footpaths in blue, laid down the current park boundary in green, and the Highbury-Uffculme boundary in pink. The map indicates several features that I’d like to know more about. The Hall has a large eastward extension (orchid house, perhaps), there is a square-ish feature and two parallel lines of trees near Uffculme, several lines of trees in the kitchen gardens, and some small rectangles that may have been plots, pens or buildings to the south (in area 1676). These are more readily seen in the larger image.
With those features in mind, I set out with a camera (and tripod) to see what I could find, and have compiled about 90 of the photos into a visual tour of the area near the pond. These images are also set out individually on our Picasa web pages.
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The slides include a route map of sorts, with red dots showing where each segment of photos began. The route map shows the paths on current maps, but which are not necessarily anywhere to be found on the ground! I tried to follow the recent map, and as the photos show, there are places where no path is evident. So the current maps must be based on data from some time ago. Fifty years, maybe?