Dorney

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dorney is a village in the English county of Buckinghamshire, near to Slough and about two and a half miles west of Eton.

The village name is Old English and means "island frequented by bumble bees". This refers to the fact that it was once a patch of hard ground in the middle of a marshy bog, though with modern farming methods the marshland has more or less disappeared. In the Domesday Book of 1086 the village was referred to as Dornei.

The manor house, Dorney Court, is listed among England's many fine country houses. The nearby Dorneywood is used as country home for a senior member of the Government, usually a Secretary of State or Minister of the Crown.

Today the village's proximity to the M4 motorway (therefore with a close link into London) has meant that it is now an area popular with executives and commuters. It is also the location of Dorney Lake, where the canoeing and rowing events at the 2012 Summer Olympics are to be held.

The village is on the north bank of the River Thames, and is surrounded to the south, east and west by the non-metropolitan county of Berkshire, with only a narrow strip of land running north (through Burnham) to the main body of Buckinghamshire. This anomaly dates to the Local Government Act 1972, which came into force on April 1, 1974 - the village had been originally included in Berkshire as the Bill, but an amendment to keep it in Buckinghamshire was proposed by local MP Ronald Bell, and accepted by the government. ^[1]

The parish church is dedicated to Saint James.

Dorney is where the first pineapple in the UK was grown.