Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join. It is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a state of suspended animation. Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to Northaw. [Picture: Old Toll-House, Potter’s Bar] It was not a beautiful building, but it hinted of old times, and its disappearance is to be regretted. It was taken down because already, in the first twelve months of the new automobile era a car had dashed into it and done most of any demolition necessary. A War Memorial now stands on the site. Between this and Hatfield the road goes in undulating fashion, with the Great Northern Railway on the left hand nearly all the way, but chiefly downhill. Down Little Heath Hill and then half-way up the succeeding incline we come to a cutting which affords a newer and easier road than the hilly route to the left. [Picture: Ganwick Corner] Where this joins the old road again, nearly two miles onward, at Bell Bar, stands the pretty “Swan” inn. The “bar” has, of course, long since disappeared. Immediately ahead is Hatfield Park, stretching away for over three miles. Through the park, by where the present south lodge stands, the highway used to run in former times, and brought wayfarers between the wind and the nobility of the Cecils. Accordingly the road was diverted at the instance of the then Lord Salisbury, and the public no longer offend him, his heirs, executors, or assigns. And now, for ever and a day, those who use the road between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield village must go an extra half mile. This is indeed a free and happy country. [Picture: Bell Bar] Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair. Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House, detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which, as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store. Let us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home. If it does, it must be sorely vexed.