Grass and trees as far as the eye can see
It is hard to believe that you are in a city of eight million people. Patches of woodland alternate with open expanses of grass, which grows tall in summer. No buildings are in sight. Richmond Park was enclosed in the 1630s as a hunting ground for King Charles I. The royal herds of deer then roamed over an area of almost four square miles. Walls and gates surround the park to this day, preventing 650 red and fallow deer from invading the suburbs. Their insatiable nibbling of green shoots and leaves has created the open landscape, as no saplings can grow here unless they are protected. The boughs of the mature trees branch from the trunk 1.50 metres or more above the ground, out of reach of the deer. 1200 ancient trees, especially oaks, grow here – some of them older than the park itself. Careful forest husbandry has preserved a diverse biotope for birds and insects. Richmond Park harbours more than 1000 species of beetle, some of which need rotting timber rather than an over-managed habitat.
Human hands, too, have shaped the park. Around the ponds and skilfully created watercourses of Isabella Plantation in the south-west, magnolias and camellias bloom in early spring, rare azaleas and 50 different kinds of rhododendron from late April. From the western edge of Richmond Park there are wonderful views of the Thames valley, and even a prospect that is protected by statute of Parliament. King Henry’s Mound is a small rise from which Henry VIII is said to have gazed on St Paul’s Cathedral, waiting for a signal that his second wife, Anne Boleyn, had been executed so that he could marry Jane Seymour. Today, visitors can stand on the mound with innocent intentions and look through a gap in the hedges and trees, if the visibility is reasonably good, for a glimpse with the naked eye or the telescope that stands here of the dome of the cathedral, 10 miles away.
Info
Address Richmond Park, TW10 | Public Transport Richmond (District Line), then bus no. 371 or 65 | Hours 7am (in winter 7.30am) until dusk| Tip The café in Pembroke Lodge, on the north-west side of Richmond Park with a great view, is open daily from 9am until 5.30pm (or 30 minutes before the park closes, if earlier).
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