The Oxfordshire village torn apart by a history theme park

Telegraph

19-04-2025

Every year, in the Loire region of western France, more than two million history enthusiasts flock to a theme park known as Puy du Fou.
Visitors enjoy immersive theatre performances deep inside the forest, where medieval knights and princesses dance to live music as fireworks go off into the night.
Now, Puy du Fou is set to come to the UK, with an influx of visitors expected to invade Bucknell, a sandstone village of around 100 residents in Oxfordshire.
Villagers were left 'aghast' after a letter arrived through their doors last July notifying them of plans for the new theme park.
'It was completely unexpected,' said Chris Wells, 57, the head of the parish council. 'A letter arrived last year with a bombshell being dropped that there was a theme park being proposed at the back of the village.'
Puy du Fou has had a park in Les Epesses since 1978 and in Toledo, Spain, since 2021.
One online clip shows visitors enjoying the sight of medieval soldiers dressed in chain-mail dancing to upbeat music and taking swipes at each other with shields. Another shows actors dressed as villagers dancing in a circle to country music as the audience claps along.
Guests dine at history-themed restaurants and hotels and wander through clusters of villages built in different period styles.
Run by Philippe de Villiers, a French former MEP, the attraction brands itself as an eco-friendly venture that has no 'rides or rollercoasters' and 'no neon flashing lights'.
But many of the 100-odd Bucknell residents think the idea is 'horrendous' and that the performances would create noise pollution, along with 'nightmare' traffic chaos if it received millions of visitors a year.
'We were aghast', Mr Wells says. 'They'll be right on the doorstep with fireworks going off, with amplified noise. You can but imagine what it's going to be like in terms of the disturbance. We're just here with that cloud of unexpected doom over us.'
Though Puy du Fou has said it is committed to minimising noise disturbance, residents are sceptical.
'Sound is a known torture instrument,' said Flo Van Diemen Van Thor, 48, of the North Oxfordshire Residents Association, a group campaigning against the plans.
'I think that it will be quite difficult for people if it turns out to be noisy, and I have a sense that it will be.'
She said she was worried that 'massive bottlenecks' would be an everyday occurrence.
Walking through the green fields where the theme park is expected to be built, she explained that Bucknell already has traffic problems.
The roar of the M40 can be heard from the village, and Bainton Road, the narrow way on which most Bucknell residents live, has little room for parking.
Cars slow down to squeeze past each other, and by lunchtime parking spaces outside the Trigger Pond pub are all occupied.
Steve Blofeld, 66, said he was worried that he would not be able to take his chocolate labrador, Teddy, on his daily walks because visitors would use the road for free parking.
'You won't be able to walk, literally, you won't be able to walk your dogs,' he said. 'You can see it's a beautiful village, which is going to be devastated by the impact of it.'
Sheila Wallington, 73, who has lived in Bucknell all her life, added: 'Initially I was very angry about it invading the village, the countryside.'
Mr De Villiers, the park's founder, is a controversial figure. He founded the far-Right political party Mouvement pour la France in 1994 with a manifesto that included a ban on building new mosques and outlawing gay marriage.
More recently, concerns have been raised over his apparent links to Russia. In 2014, Mr De Villiers and his son travelled to Moscow where they met Vladimir Putin to discuss building two theme parks in Russia – but the company has now said it abandoned the idea because of the war in Ukraine.
Patrick Woodrow, 54, a strategy consultant who has lived in Bucknell for 18 years, described the park's links to Russia as a 'national scandal', adding that it was 'insulting to my values, and I believe British values generally'.
'The residents are all appalled that the plans have been allowed to come this far', he said, adding that 'we're hoping that local and central governments step in'.
The proposals are not yet at planning application stage, but one is expected to be submitted in the coming months.
Residents have already fought against the idea in three consultations, which took place in July last year when they met the Puy du Fou press relations team, while the parish council has also raised money to campaign against the park.
Villagers have now also turned on the pig farmer who sold off the land to Puy du Fou to 'have some cash' for her children.
Kate Hedges, 73, who has lived in Bucknell since she was eight, said residents were 'pretty aggressive' initially and now completely ignored her.
'They don't speak to me', she said, but defended her decision to sell the land to Puy du Fou, arguing that it 'is better than houses'.
Ms Hedges' roots in Bucknell go back generations, and she insisted she had made the right decision for a village she has lived in for over 60 years.
She has support from others outside Bucknell who have backed plans for the park. Caroline Chipperfield-Twiddy, 53, a director who lives in the nearby village of Chesterton, is so 'evangelical' about the attraction that she started a 'We want Puy du Fou' group on Facebook, which now has nearly 200 members.
'I went out to France in August 2024 with my children at the end of summer and I was blown away,' she explained. 'All of the people in the park wear themed historic costumes, and you feel like you're being transported back in time.
'We went to the French park and we stayed in a castle surrounded by trees. It's so green, they get all their food sourced locally, they are very aware of their carbon footprint, there's very little plastic and packaging. At one restaurant, we even got something served on a wooden tray.
'It feels really authentic, you are immersed in a historic environment – whether that's the Vikings, the medieval period, the time of the musketeers or the 1930s. It's real immersion and it's fabulous.'
But now Ms Chipperfield-Twiddy said she was also feeling the wrath of Bucknell villagers, and claimed she was being trolled by those who are campaigning against the park.
'One person has got a fake profile and they are sending me nasty messages,' she said. 'Everything they do seems to be spiteful and driven by anger.'
'They are really unpleasant. None of them have been there, but how can you be so anti it when you haven't even been there?'
Whether the plans will pass remains yet to be seen, but Ms Hedges was confident she would be vindicated, adding: 'When the planning permission is granted, as Puy du Fou insist it will be, they will just have to eat humble pie.'