Virginia Water, Surrey
Historical Description
Virginia Water, an ecclesiastical parish in Surrey, with a station on the L. & S.W.R., 23 miles from London, and 4 WSW of Staines. It was constituted in 1839, and it has a post, money order, and telegraph office. Population, 1836. Virginia Water lake here lies in the S of Windsor Forest, is the largest artificial sheet of water in England, was formed at great expense in marshy grounds for William, Duke of Cumberland after 1746, sends off its superfluence by a stream making a cascade, and has a Chinese fishing temple, a hermitage, a turreted triangular building called the Belvidere, and a miniature frigate. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Winchester; gross value, £57. The church is a building of brick in the Pointed style, and has a tower and spire. The Holloway Sanatorium, St Ann's Heath, instituted in 1885 as a registered hospital for the care and cure of mental invalids of the middle and upper classes, was erected at the cost of the late Mr Thomas Holloway, and is a building of red brick in the Gothic style, with accommodation for 350. patients. The grounds, 35 acres in extent, are well laid out.
Church Records
Ancestry.co.uk, in association with Surrey History Centre, have images of the Parish Registers for Surrey online.
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Surrey is available to browse.
Maps
Online maps of Virginia Water are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following Surrey papers online:
Visitations Heraldic
The Visitation of Surrey, 1662-1668 is available on the Heraldry page.