Tina, a Windsor resident who has walked the park for 15 years, says the reality is far more significant than many headlines suggest.
“People think it’s just a small two-mile radius,” she explains. “But thousands of acres are effectively impacted. For many of us, this was our daily life.”
“It’s Like Losing Your Back Garden”
Windsor Great Park is partly public and partly private. More than half is already restricted — making the remaining public areas, locals argue, incredibly precious.
Tina used to train her energetic Golden Cocker Retriever off-lead in open oak-dotted fields near Cranbourne Gate. Now, she says, walkers are being funneled into already crowded sections of the park.
“At weekends, it’s ridiculously overcrowded,” she says. “The open countryside made it easy to train my dog. Now we’re forced into dense woodland or busy areas.”
She recalls meeting another woman in the park just days before access ended.
“She told me she cried when she got the email.”
Others who held special access keys to nearby woodland — describing it as “like their back garden” — were also left devastated.
“I haven’t been back,” Tina admits. “Seeing it all fenced off with police signs… it hurts.”