by Every year in the Loire region of West France, more than two million historical lovers flock to a theme park called Puy du Fou.
Visitors enjoy unive theater performances deep in the forest, where medieval knights and princesses dance to live music while the fireworks start to go into the night.
Now Puy du Fou will come to Great Britain, whereby an influx of visitors is expected to enter Bucknell, a sandstone village with around 100 inhabitants in Oxfordshire.
After a letter in July last July, the villagers remained “Aghast” in which they were informed about plans for the new themed park.
“It was completely unexpected,” said Chris Wells, 57, the head of the local council. “Last year a letter arrived, a bomb was dropped that a themed park was proposed in the back of the village.”
Puy du Fou has had a park in Les Epessen since 1978 and in Toledo, Spain, since 2021.
An online clip shows the visitors who enjoy the sight of medieval soldiers who are dressed in chain email dance to make the music optimistic and wipe each other with signs. Another shows actors who are disguised as villagers who dance to country music in a circle while the audience joins.
The guests dine in restaurants and hotels with historical motifs and hiking through clusters of villages that were built in different time styles.
The attraction of Philippe de Villiers, a French former (former MP “, as an environmentally friendly company that does not contain any” trips or roller coasters “and” No Neon Blinking Lights “.
But many of the 100 ODD residents of Bucknell consider the idea to be “terrible” and that the performances would cause the noise pollution and the “nightmare” procedural chaos if it received millions of visitors a year.
“We were horrified,” says Wells. “You will be on the doorstep with a fireworks with a reinforced noise. However, you can imagine how it will be with regard to the fault.
Although Puy du Fou said it is obliged to minimize noise disorders, the residents are skeptical.
“Sound is a well -known torture instrument,” said Flo van Diemen van Thor, 48, from the North Oxfordshire Residents Association, a group that fought against the plans.
“I think it will be quite difficult for people if it turns out that it is loud and I have the feeling that it will be.”
She said she was concerned that “massive bottlenecks” would be an everyday event.
When she went through the green fields on which the theme park is to be built, she explained that Bucknell already has traffic problems.
The roar of the M40 can be heard from the village, and the Bainton Road, the narrow way in which most of Bucknell’s residents live have little space to park.
Cars slow down to push past each other, and during the lunch break outside the trigger pond knipping, everyone is occupied.
Steve Blofeld, 66, said that he was concerned that he could not take his chocolate -Labrador Teddy on his daily walks because the visitors would use the street for free parking.
“You will not be able to be unable to walk your dogs in the truest sense of the word,” he said. “You can see that it is a beautiful village that is destroyed by the effects of it.”
The 73 -year -old Sheila Wallington, who lived in Bucknell all her life, added: “At first I was very angry that I entered the village, the landscape.”
Mr. de Villiers, the founder of the park, is a controversial figure. He founded the right-wing extremist political party in 1994 with a manifesto that included a ban on building new mosques and the ban on gay marriage.
Recently, concerns about his obvious connections to Russia have been expressed. In 2014, Mr. de Villiers and his son traveled to Moscow, where they met Vladimir Putin to build two themed parks in Russia – but the company has now said that it gave up the idea because of the war in Ukraine.
Patrick Woodrow, 54, a strategy consultant who has lived in Bucknell for 18 years, described the links of the park to Russia as a “national scandal” and added that it “insulted for my values, and I believe that the British values in general”.
“The residents are horrified that the plans were allowed to go so far,” he said, adding that “we hope that local and central governments will occur”.
The proposals are not yet in the planning application level, but it is expected that the coming months will be submitted.
The residents have already fought the idea in three consultations that took place last July last year when they got to know the Puy du Fou Press Relations team, while the local council also collected money to fight the park.
The villagers have now also switched on the pig farmers who sold the country to Puy du Fou to “have money for their children”.
The 73 -year -old Kate Hedges, who has lived in Bucknell since the age of eight, said that the residents were initially “quite aggressive” and now completely ignored them.
“You don’t talk to me,” she said, but defended her decision to sell the country to Puy du Fou, and argued that it was “better than houses”.
Mrs. Hedges’ roots in Bucknell are generations go back, and she insisted that she had made the right decision for a village in which she had lived for over 60 years.
She has support from others outside of Bucknell who supported 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 has started a group “We want Puy du Fou” on Facebook, which now has almost 200 members.
“I went to France with my children in August 2024 at the end of summer and had flapped,” she said. “All people in the park wear thematic historical costumes and they feel like they are back into the past.
“We went to the French park and stayed in a castle surrounded by trees. It is so green that they all get their food on site. They are very aware of their CO2 footprint, there is very little plastic and packaging. In a restaurant we even served something on a wooden shell.
“It feels really authentic, they are immersed in a historical environment – be it the Vikings, the medieval time, the time of musketers or the 1930s. It is real immersion and it is fabulous.”
But now Ms. Chipperfield-Twiddy said that she also feels the anger of the villagers of Bucknell and claimed that she was trolled by those who campaigned against the park.
“A person has a wrong profile and they send me bad news,” she said. “Everything they do seems malicious and driven by anger.”
“You are really uncomfortable. None of you were there, but how can you be so anti if you weren’t even there?”
Whether the plans can still be seen, but Ms. Hedges was confident that she would be confirmed and added: “If the building permit is granted how Puy du Fou will insist that it will be, you only have to eat modest cakes.”
