Virginia Water (lake)

Where it sits. Virginia Water is a long, narrow ornamental lake at the southern end of Windsor Great Park, straddling the Surrey and Berkshire border about five miles south of Windsor Castle and twenty-two miles west of central London. It runs roughly a mile and a half from the Cascade at its eastern end to Blacknest at the west, covering around 130 acres, and is fringed almost entirely by mature woodland, rhododendron and cedar, so that from the water's edge you rarely see a building.

The story behind it. The lake is entirely artificial and dates from the 1750s, when the Duke of Cumberland, third son of George II and Ranger of Windsor Great Park, employed the brothers Thomas and Paul Sandby to dam a stream and flood the valley. At its completion it was the largest man-made body of water in Britain. The original dam failed catastrophically in 1768 and the lake was rebuilt on a larger scale, reaching its present form in the 1780s. What makes it more than a landscape lake is the collection of things the Georgians and their successors put around it. The Cascade at the eastern end is a constructed waterfall of Bagshot Heath sandstone boulders, arranged to look natural and doing so convincingly. The Ruins on the southern shore are real Roman columns, capitals and pediments brought from the city of Leptis Magna in what is now Libya, presented to the Prince Regent in 1816 and erected here as a picturesque folly in 1826 — a genuine North African Roman city, reassembled as a garden feature in Surrey. Above the western arm stands a 100-foot totem pole of western red cedar, carved in British Columbia by the Kwakwaka'wakw artist Mungo Martin and given to the Queen in 1958 for the province's centenary.

On screen. Virginia Water served repeatedly as the shore of the Hogwarts lake. In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban the trio sit and walk at the water's edge while Hagrid tells them about Buckbeak's hearing and the appeal against the hippogriff's execution, and lakeside material for the film's later sequences was shot here too. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the lake stood in for the setting of the second task of the Triwizard Tournament, with a wooden jetty and spectator staging built out over the water for the champions to dive from, and further shoreline scenes — Harry reading, Neville fishing, conversations between the tasks — were filmed along the same banks. The on-screen geography is again a construction. The Black Lake is supposed to sit beneath a castle in the Scottish Highlands, ringed by mountains; the plates that supply those mountains come from Glen Coe and the lochs of Lochaber, and the castle is a model and a digital build. What Virginia Water actually provides is a still, dark, tree-lined waterline of exactly the right character, forty minutes from the studio at Leavesden.

What you actually see today. A circuit of about four and a half miles runs right around the lake on a broad, surfaced path with almost no gradient, which makes this one of the most accessible large landscapes near London for buggies and wheelchairs. Walking clockwise from the Wick Road car park you pass the Cascade, the Ruins, the wide open water of the main basin, the Totem Pole and the plantations of the Valley Gardens, which hold the national collections of rhododendron and a Punch Bowl of azaleas that turns solid orange and pink in May. The Savill Garden, a formal 35-acre ornamental garden with its own timber-gridshell visitor building, adjoins the eastern end and charges separate admission. Fort Belvedere, the castellated house above the lake where Edward VIII signed his instrument of abdication in 1936, is private and glimpsed only through trees.

Getting there and timing. Virginia Water railway station is about fifteen minutes' walk from the Blacknest end, on the line from London Waterloo via Staines. By car, the main pay-and-display car park is on Wick Road off the A30, with others at Blacknest Gate and the Savill Garden. Entry to the park and lake is free; you pay only to park. May for the azaleas and rhododendrons, and late October for the cedar, beech and maple colour in the Valley Gardens, are the two obvious high points. Early mornings are still and reflective; weekend afternoons in good weather fill the car parks by mid-morning.