Black Park
Black Park[1] is a Country Park in Wexham, Buckinghamshire, England to the north of the A412 road between Slough and Iver Heath. It is owned by Buckinghamshire County Council.
The park covers 530 acres (214 ha) of attractive woodland, heathland and grassland. It includes an impressive avenue of mature pine trees, an orienteering course, a large lake (dug in the 18th century as a reservior for a local farmer) and a lakeside cafe.
The park is adjacent to Pinewood Film Studios and has been used as an outdoor location for many film and television productions.
The scenic woods and lake featured prominently in the legendary Hammer Horror films, from the late 1950s right up to the 1970s.[2]. In these films the location was often represented as Transylvania, as in the opening sequence of the The Brides of Dracula (1960). This features a shot of the wood and lake as a doom laden voice intones:
- "Transylvania, land of dark forests, dread mountains and black unfathomed lakes, still the home of magic and devilry as the nineteenth century draws to its close. Count Dracula, monarch of all vampires is dead but his disciples live on to spread the the cult and corrupt the world"
The park has been used in other film productions such as Goldfinger (1964) (where it was used for a night car chase scene involving James Bond's Aston Martin DB5), several Carry On films, the Monty Python film And Now For Something Completely Different (1971), Wombling Free (1977), Batman (1989), Sleepy Hollow (1999), the Harry Potter film series, (2001-) and more recently it was one of the locations used for the James Bond film: Casino Royale (2006)and for the Horror/Thriller Eden Lake (2008).
References
- ^ Black Park country park
- ^ Wayne Kinsey (2002) Hammer Films: The Bray Studio Years. London: Reynolds and Hearn
External links
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