Right opposite the upper end of the garden of North End House, and no doubt close to the highroad in former days, stands an ancient solitary tree, known as the Gibbet Elm, one of two trees between which stood the gallows on which, in the May of 1673, one Jackson, a notorious highwayman, was hung in chains for the murder of Henry Miller on, or near, the spot. There for years from season to season mouldered the skeleton of the murderer, swinging wildly out before the scourging winter winds, with the rusty chain-links creaking, as it were, a ghastly requiem, or in high summer perhaps a nesting-place for birds, such instances of bird-building between the ribs or in the skulls of felons being not uncommon in those days, when gibbets were more plentiful by the waysides than hand-posts. After long years of purgatorial nights and days, Nature would receive into her bosom the time-bleached bones, to make the grass grow greener about the base of the old tree, whose companion was blown down some fifty years ago. The elm, when I last saw it in 1863-64, was still sound,[173] and, though beaten about and storm-broken, stretched forth its branches a goodly distance, its root ‘Like snakes in wild festoon, In ramous wrestlings interlaced, A forest Laocoön.’[174] The upright of the gibbet, by one of those curious freaks common to ancient landlords, who early learnt the attractiveness of morbid curiosities, and knew with Trinculo that ‘those who will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar will lay out ten to see a dead Indian,’ was converted into a part of the kitchen mantelpiece at Jack Straw’s Castle, serving thenceforth as a fertile subject for the ale-consuming and company-constraining gossip of times not so long past, when few cared to cross the Heath alone after nightfall—times of which Hicks’s Hall and the Newgate Calendar keep record still. [Illustration: _Old Cottages, North End._] Passing Heath Lodge, we leave the footpath for the main road, and find ourselves at North End. In Elizabeth’s time this was literally wildwood and waste. Here, as at Belsize, Gerard found what he calls the white butterfly orchis, ‘near unto a small cottage in the way as you go from London to Hendon, a village thereby, in the field next the pound, or pinnefold without.’ North End, so called from its situation at the northern extremity of the Heath, consists of a cluster of middle-class houses, cottages, and pleasant gardens. It does not seem, says Park, to be a place of any antiquity. No doubt the Wildwood, as the fragment of the old forest was quaintly called, formerly overran the site of the present hamlet, and lingered here after the clearance of the woods from other portions of the district.