Parkland Walk
Oxford Road Finsbury Park London N4 3EY
‘London’s longest local nature reserve’, says Haringey Council, which rather undersells a destination that is popular with joggers, dog-walkers and weekend strollers. Running 5.5 miles from Finsbury Park to Alexandra Palace, via Crouch End and Highgate, the walk follows a former railway line, a narrow strip of woods and miniature meadows that slices north through residential streets and is home to 22 species of butterfly, hedgehogs, slow-worms and foxes. Not that wildlife is really the point. En route you dip through cuttings and under bridges brightly sprayed with graffiti art; you zip past back gardens and even pass a ghost station at Crouch End. Look for the spriggan emerging from a wall just before the latter, a bronze sculpture by local artist Marilyn Collins that some say depicts the supernatural man-monster that picked off walkers in Stephen King’s horror story ‘Crouch End’ – though this has been confirmed more or less as an urban myth; in fact it is meant to represent Crouch End's place in the history of green living and permaculture.
