Windsor Great Park — Herne the Hunter

OVERVIEW

Two thousand hectares of ancient oak forest and parkland south of Windsor Castle, the remnant of the medieval Windsor Forest, run by the Crown Estate. Herne the Hunter is its ghost: a keeper of the forest who, in the tale, hanged himself from an oak and returns with a stag's antlers on his head, blasting trees, souring milk and riding with hounds at midnight.

HISTORY

The earliest record is The Merry Wives of Windsor (c. 1597), where Mistress Page tells the tale as an old one; the 1602 quarto says mothers used it to frighten children. Herne's Oak, the tree pointed out to visitors, blew down in 1863 and was replaced by Edward VII in 1906. Harrison Ainsworth's novel Windsor Castle (1843) added the Devil's bargain, and twentieth-century writers the idea that Herne appears before national disasters; one theory names a Henry VIII-era poacher, Richard Horne.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

First-person accounts of the horn, hounds and a horned rider in the park date only from the twentieth century, including a run in the 1920s. The tradition is literary before it is testimonial, and the entry says so.

VISITING

The Great Park is open daily on foot and by bicycle; the Long Walk, Snow Hill and the Savill Garden are public. The Home Park by the castle is private.