Before the Lake
Virginia Water 1st January 1748

Virginia Water was created in the eighteenth century, during the great age of landscape gardening. The forest streams that made its creation possible had of course been there for many years, probably many centuries. John Norden's maps of Windsor Forest and of the Great Park, two of a series which he made for James I in 1607, show these clearly. Towards the end of his reign James I did in fact spend £600 on "draining and conveying the water which now overspreadeth divers parts of the great park of Windsor, and maketh it unfruitful". There is no evidence, however, that the works carried out at that time resulted in the construction of a lake. Norden's maps had shown no more than streams and ponds where Virginia Water now is. Two maps of the mid-eighteenth century - those of John Vardy in 1750 and John Rocque in 1752 - still show nothing more. Within the next few years, however, Virginia Water had come into existence.

In the seventeenth century the Great Park consisted of woods, heathland and swamp. When Samuel Pepys stayed at Cranbourne Lodge in August 1665, he recorded in his Diary: "I walk forth to see the place, and find it to be a very noble seat, in a noble forest, with the noblest prospects towards Windsor and round about over many countys, but otherwise a very melancholy place, and little variety save only trees".

His Diary gives no hint how far to the south of the Great Park (where Virginia Water is now), Pepys went. Yet in fact this southern area, although most remote from Windsor, was one of the earliest parts of the Park. "The King's Park in the Forest of Windsor was well named because it was formed by land taken from the Forest and imparked. Much of this southern area had been taken from the Forest by the thirteenth century. Moreover this part of the Park provided a setting for a Royal Manor Lodge. Throughout the Middle Ages Windsor Castle was still primarily a fort rather than a residence. By 1246, in the reign of Henry III, we read of the "King's houses" and "the Queen's houses" in the Park and Robert Lightfoot became "Keeper of the houses in the Park" in 1277. The site of the Manor Lodge was towards the western end of the present Virginia Water, near where in the nineteenth century the Fishing Temple and the Fishing Cottage were situated. For three centuries and more it remained a Royal residence - it was still there at the time of the Commonwealth survey in 1649.

The passion of English kings and their courtiers over the centuries was hunting. Their interest was in the pleasures of the chase, not in the enjoyment of lakes and landscaped gardens. "He loved the tall stags as if he were their father". The familiar words which the chronicler applied to William the Conqueror might be applied equally to his successors for the next six hundred years and more.

Until the end of the eighteenth century the Park was more constricted to the south than it is now. The ancient Roman road from London by way of Staines to Silchester ran near its southern boundary, though its exact course in the neighbourhood of the Park is uncertain. To the west, stretches of it are clearly defined and The Devil's Highway appears on Ordnance Survey maps. Perhaps this title is of Saxon origin. Just as the Saxons deserted Roman towns like Silchester, so they seem to have had an abhorrence of Roman roads. In mediaeval times the road to London - the forerunner of the present A30 - also touched the southern boundary of the Park. It was conveniently accessible from the King's Manor Lodge and only some five miles to Staines, whence it was possible to proceed to London by river. In 1406 Henry IV, who was lying sick at the Manor, wrote to his Council that he hoped to be well enough to leave Staines for Westminster by water the same evening.

The name of Virginia was already in use in the seventeenth century. There was as yet no lake and hence it was Virginia River and this appellation continued until the second half of the eighteenth century. Even in the engravings of the 1750s, when the lake had been formed, the captions still refer to the Virginia River and not Water. We have: "View from the North side of the Virginia River, near the Manor Lodge" and "The Great Bridge over the Virginia River".

There can be no certainty about the origin of the name. The most obvious derivation perhaps is from Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, whose long and glorious reign had preceded that of the first Stuart. But there is no evidence for this. The colony of Virginia does, however, date from the early seventeenth century and could have provided the name, first of the little river, and then of the lake. Later stories which accept the attractively simplistic explanation that the Duke of Cumberland named his lake Virginia because he had been Governor of Virginia are completely groundless. For one thing Cumberland was never Governor of Virginia and for another the name of Virginia was in use before Cumberland's time. What we do not know is exactly when and why the name was first applied. G.M. Hughes, in A History of Windsor Forest, Sunninghill and the Great Park, published in 1890, records that "Virginia" is marked on a map of 1662 as the name of a house "where now stands the under-keeper's lodge" and concludes that the name of the house became the name of the river nearby. That is probably the earliest record of the use of the name in the Great Park. Interesting too is the map of the road from London to Land's End in John Ogilby's Britannia of 1675. In the section from Staines to Bagshot the name New England occurs where the road skirts Windsor Great Park - near the site of the present Wheatsheaf Hotel. New England Inn is marked on road maps like those of Daniel Paterson's Roads of England and Wales until at least the edition of 1787. The name Virginia occurs in place-name in Newfoundland and New Brunswick, both of which had trading links with the colony of Virginia. So the association between the Windsor Great Park names and those of the New World may have some substance.

That is probably as far as we can go. And once place-names come into common usage they often remain, and the Virginia River which was there before Cumberland's time became the Virginia Water which he created.