There's gold in them there hills

From Scottish kings to political protest, there’s more to Muswell Hill than its height, finds Carla Passino

- Carla Passino

A SCOTTISH king (Malcolm IV) put Muswell Hill on the map. Legend has it that the sovereign, ‘being strangely diseased, was by some divine intelligence advised to take the water of a well in England called Muswell, which after long scrutination… was found and performed the cure,’ according to Elizabethan cartographer John Norden, who nonetheless expressed healthy scepticism at the story.

The miraculous well (which existed until 1898) and the chapel built near it quickly became beacons for penitent Londoners, who would journey to pray at the foot of Our Lady of Muswell. Once the Lady had worked her wonders, however, the pilgrims would gather in the far less saintly taverns that embroidered the chapel’s surroundings, for ‘no one objected to pleasure and merriment,’ wrote Walter Besant in his 1906 Mediaeval London, although ‘the merriment was not always seemly, nor was the pleasure always sinless’.

The Dissolution of Monasteries put a swift end to both the pilgrimages and the ensuing recreation, with the area passing from the Priory of Clerkenwell to private owners. Variously known as Muswell, Moswelia, but also Pinnersnall, the steep hill—a relic of the Ice Age—was ill suited to arable farming, but its clean air and fine views turned it into the perfect retreat for the Tudor and Stuart wealthy, not least Sir Julius Caesar, James I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.