Windsor Great Park
Windsor Great Park is one of the finest royal parks in Britain, a 5,000-acre landscape of ancient woodland, formal gardens, a long avenue and the Virginia Water lake that extends south from Windsor Castle through the Berkshire and Surrey countryside in a designed landscape reflecting the ambitions and tastes of successive royal patrons from the medieval period to the present day. The park is open to the public and provides one of the finest and most accessible combinations of natural and designed landscape available near London. The Long Walk, a three-mile avenue of plane trees extending from the George IV Gate at Windsor Castle to the equestrian statue of George III at Snow Hill, is one of the most impressive formal landscape features in the royal parks, its alignment providing a direct visual connection between the castle and the park landscape that was established in the reign of Charles II. The view along the Long Walk from the statue back to the castle silhouette is one of the most reproduced images of Windsor. The Savill Garden within the park, established in the 1930s and extended over the following decades, is one of the finest ornamental gardens in Britain, its collection of rhododendrons, azaleas, roses and herbaceous plants providing excellent seasonal displays throughout the year. The Valley Garden adjacent provides a more naturalistic complement to the Savill Garden's formal qualities. The Virginia Water lake, created in the eighteenth century, provides the principal water feature and the lakeside walk is one of the most popular routes in the park, the ruins of Roman columns brought from Libya adding an unexpected archaeological element to the landscape.