Park of the week

26. Queen’s Wood

This is one of four ancient woodlands in Haringey. The others are Highgate Wood (on the other side of Muswell Hill Road) which, as we visited before the pandemic I won’t write about here, Coldfall Wood, the subject of my very first post, and Bluebell Wood, which we haven’t visited yet. All four are descendants of the original wildwood that covered Britain until about five thousand years ago. 

The ancient hornbeam and oak woodland used to be known as Churchyard Bottom Wood, but in 1898 the Local Authority bought it from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and renamed it in honour of Queen Victoria. It was declared a statutory local nature reserve in 1990 and is listed by the London Ecology Unit as a Site of Metropolitan Importance.  It first won a Green Flag Award in 2015 and has kept it ever since.

It contains plants that are most often found in ancient woodland, such as wood anemone and orchids, and a wide variety of birds. There are solid paths throughout the wood, which is quite hilly. Dog walking is allowed but cycling is not.

A small disused paddling pool has been converted into a frog pond with wild aquatic plants, home to amphibians. Water birds are “not encouraged”, because they eat the other inhabitants. I don’t know how you’d discourage them other than not chucking bread in the water. The pond is also used by birds and mammals such as bats and foxes to drink, bathe and feed. Two more ponds have been created in the wood, edged with ancient-looking dead hedging created recently from wood cut as part of coppicing. The wood is also the source of the Moselle, a stream that runs across parts of North London on its way (via Pymmes Brook) to the River Lea in Tottenham. It’s a quiet place to walk, given its location. 

There’s a café using organic vegetables grown in their own garden at the back. The items on the menu looked delicious, nearly all vegetarian which suited me, but I only bought an ice cream tub for Jack (thank goodness they had strawberry – and points to me for restraint). The café has toilets.

The main entrance is in Muswell Hill Road, N10, but there are also entrances in Summersby Road, Connaught Gardens, Wood Vale, Priory Gardens and Queens Wood Road. We used the main entrance and managed to find a space to park in a nearby road, which is often not easy.

Judith Field

Queen’s Wood, Muswell Hill Road, London N10