Virginia Water: a royal lake, a golf estate and one crowded week in September.

Virginia Water takes its name from the lake on the southern edge of Windsor Great Park — Crown Estate land, with the Cascade, the Leptis Magna ruins and a path of about four and a half miles around the shore. Most of the village’s restaurants cluster by the station, where the Waterloo–Reading line meets the Chertsey branch and a frequent service runs into Waterloo. The A30 skirts the park, the M3 runs past the village and the M25 passes close by at Thorpe; Heathrow is about seven miles off. For visitors there is Great Fosters, the Elizabethan house on the Egham side that now runs as a hotel.

Wealth here gathers largely in two private enclaves on either side of the village centre. The Wentworth Estate — heathland woods, golf and large houses on private roads kept under their own Act of Parliament, patrolled by a security firm the estate contracts — has long been home to sport, entertainment and business money. Virginia Park, just north of the station, is a gated and walled development of around 190 houses and apartments, centred on the Grade I-listed former Holloway Sanatorium. In September the BMW PGA Championship brings a six-figure crowd to the West Course over the week. For the rest of the year the exposed house is the one left empty for weeks while its owners are away — what away-day property watch is for.

A survey here starts with which kind of home it is. On the Wentworth Estate it is usually a detached house off a private road: the approach from that road, the gates, the staff and deliveries that come and go. In Virginia Park it is a house or apartment inside a shared perimeter, and the questions narrow to the development’s gate and the front door. Security drivers take the Heathrow run and the M3 into London, planning championship week around the crowd. Close protection is for the household whose profile calls for it; most here will not need it.