Broadwater

 lake  Add category

Artificial lake. It was landscaped to separate the farmland of Oatlands Park from its parkland (the successor to demolished Oatlands Palace to the west). A minority of the parkland remains for aesthetic reasons such as as a wedding venue but little compared to the vast parkland before, however a public park to the south and Weybridge Health Spa to the north benefit from the unusually well-preserved legacy of the lake and farmland, which provides invaluable and irreplaceable flood meadow for this stretch of the Thames in times of exceptional rainfall across southern England, the next such major space being Ham meadows many miles east on the Tidal Thames/non-tidal Thames divide and Hampton Court Park which has not in living memory flooded much due to its slightly higher profile.