Windsor Great Park has been royal riding country for nearly a thousand years — William the Conqueror hunted here, George III rode these same avenues — and today, guests of Fairmont Windsor Park can follow those hoofprints through 4,800 acres of ancient parkland courtesy of an exclusive partnership with Wayside Stables, the family-run equestrian centre licensed to take riders inside the park itself. The pairing gives Fairmont Windsor Park something few five-star hotels anywhere can claim: genuine, licensed access to one of the most historically significant riding landscapes in the world, departing from and returning to a hotel built to match it in quality.
The Wayside Stables package is designed to be as complete as it is exclusive: private and small-group rides matched to ability, guided routes along the famous Long Walk and through quiet woodland trails where deer hold their ground as you pass, and the full run of Fairmont Windsor Park’s own considerable amenities — an award-winning spa, seven restaurants and bars, and 251 rooms and suites set across 40 acres of manicured grounds and lakeside parkland — waiting on return.
The arrangement is straightforward and quietly exceptional. You stay at one of the finest luxury hotels in the south of England. You step outside, and one of the most remarkable riding settings in Britain is waiting. For a hotel experience that places you genuinely inside equestrian history, rather than merely adjacent to it, Fairmont Windsor Park is in a category of its own.
The Experience
The morning begins with the particular silence of a parkland that has not changed in essence for centuries. You collect your horse from Wayside Stables — a family-run operation that has been guiding riders through Windsor Great Park for years, and whose team know every path, every tree line, every place where the view opens without warning into something that stops you mid-stride. The matching of horse to rider is attentive; the guides are unhurried.
Within minutes you are in it. Not looking at Windsor Great Park through a windscreen or across a car park fence, but moving through it, the horse’s rhythm settling into yours, the Long Walk unfolding ahead. The famous two-and-a-half-mile avenue runs from Windsor Castle to the Copper Horse statue of George III on Snow Hill, and riding it is a genuinely different experience to walking it. The scale registers differently from the saddle. So does the history.
The woodland trails offer another mood entirely — close, green, the light breaking through the canopy in the way English woodland light does in the morning or late afternoon. The deer are accustomed to horses and will often hold their ground, watching calmly as you pass. Ancient oaks line paths that have carried riders in every century since the park was enclosed.
What awaits you at the Fairmont when you return is the other half of the equation. The spa, the dining rooms, the suites with views across the Surrey and Berkshire countryside — all of it exactly calibrated for the kind of guest who wants the best of everything, and who finds that the best of everything includes an hour on horseback in a royal park.
About Fairmont Windsor Park & Wayside Stables
Fairmont Windsor Park opened in 2021 as the Fairmont brand’s flagship UK property, occupying a purpose-built country house hotel on the edge of Windsor Great Park in Surrey, less than an hour from central London. The hotel was designed to complement rather than compete with its extraordinary setting — its architecture sympathetic to the English country house tradition, its 229 rooms and suites positioned to make the most of views across the parkland and the Surrey Hills beyond.
The partnership with Wayside Stables is what gives the hotel its genuine equestrian credibility. Wayside is a family-run centre holding one of the licences that permit guided riding inside Windsor Great Park — a restriction that exists precisely because the park remains a protected royal estate rather than open public land. The horses are well-schooled and carefully kept, the guides deeply knowledgeable about both the terrain and its centuries of royal history, and the riding is genuinely accessible to all levels, from complete beginners to confident, cantering riders.
What sets the Fairmont Windsor Park & Wayside Stables package apart is precisely this combination — a five-star hotel of real substance, paired with licensed access to a landscape that has been royal riding country for the better part of a millennium. Very few hotels anywhere can offer guests a genuine sense of riding inside history rather than merely alongside it, and for guests of the Fairmont, that is exactly what awaits just beyond the front door.
Our Stewardship
Fairmont Windsor Park is certified under Green Key, the international eco-label for tourism facilities. On the grounds, two beehives are cared for by the hotel’s own beekeeper, with the honey supplying its restaurants, and a Kitchen Garden grows herbs used across the property’s dining venues. Food is sourced locally where possible, including from The Royal Farms and Windsor artisans. The estate directly borders Windsor Great Park, and Wayside Stables holds one of the licenses permitting horseback access inside the park itself.
