There are few more magical sights than a herd of deer, peacefully grazing in a park. They are gentle, graceful animals – and so shy that it is always a treat to see one, even if, as in a lane down which I was driving the other day, it is scrambling into a hedgerow alarmingly close to the front of the car.
Encounters like that, though, aren’t quite the rarity they once were. Scientists say that there are more of the creatures in these islands now than at any time since the Ice Age. Nobody, strangely, knows the exact numbers, though there are thought to be at least 1.5 million alive today. Controversy is bubbling around the suggestion by experts this week that 50 or 60 per cent of them ought to be culled each year. Poor Bambi. A cull would keep Sainsbury’s stocked with Taste the Difference venison steaks until the next Ice Age.
A public outcry would be understandable, given just how far back our relationship with deer goes. Around 26,000 years ago, Stone Age people were using antlers to heap up the huge dome of earth that is Silbury Hill, in Wiltshire. This would prove a boon to archaeologists. Since deer shed their antlers every year, they can be accurately carbon-dated. The Celts regarded deer as supernatural cattle, milked by fairies. Since that time, they have become embedded in folklore. Every year, dancers put antlers on their heads to perform the Horn Dance at Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire and the ritual of Filly Loo at Ashmore, in Dorset, remembering the ancient desire to conjure fertility out of the earth.
Furthermore, the aggressive sexuality of the rutting stag is preserved, linguistically, in expressions such as stag night. Falstaff was duped into wearing antlers in The Merry Wives of Windsor, as part of the punishment inflicted by womenfolk who objected to his indiscriminate advances. Horns were also a symbol of cuckoldry.
Medieval kings did not deign to hunt an animal as low caste as the fox. Deer were their quarry, and some monarchs went to enormous lengths to enjoy the sport. Having conquered England, William I set aside huge tracts of his new domain as royal forest, expressly for the hunting of deer. These areas, which included Sherwood Forest and the New Forests, were subject to their own system of administration, which required peasants to lame their dogs to reduce poaching and inflicted vicious punishments on anyone caught in the act. At Bainbridge in Yorkshire, a horn – kept in the Rose and Crown pub – is blown every evening between Holy Rood (September 27) and Shrovetide (before Lent). This village was established in 1227 to house a dozen of the foresters who policed the Forest of Wensleydale, and the sound of the horn may originally have guided them home through the dark.
From the 13th century, deer parks were established around country houses like Petworth and Knole to provide a convenient supply of venison for the lord’s table. Huge quantities might be required. In the summer of 1251, 300 deer were acquired, in advance of the royal wedding that was due to take place on Boxing Day, between Henry III’s daughter, Margaret, and Alexander III of Scotland.
Richard II adopted the white hart as his emblem: the angels surrounding the Virgin and Child on the Wilton Diptych, commissioned by Richard and now in the National Gallery, are shown wearing it on badges, as though they were members of his household. Some cheek! The White Hart is now one of the most popular of pub signs.
Ministers had to beg James I, who cut more of a dash on a horse than he did on his weak legs, to desist from hunting deer long enough to sign papers of state. Oliver Cromwell banned many things but not hunting. It was during the Commonwealth that the hunchback Crump Dutton, whose nephew married Cromwell’s daughter, built Lodge Park in Gloucestershire, owned by the National Trust. This architectural jewel owes its existence to Crump’s love of deer coursing: it was a grandstand from which he could bet on hounds pursuing a stag.
In the Victorian period, the method of hunting changed. Gentlemen in heather-coloured tweeds crawled through the Highland undergrowth for a shot with a rifle. Scottish hunting lodges were panelled with deerskin, provided with doorhandles made from antlers, and hung with a forest of many-pointed trophies – the ultimate expression being achieved by the Duke of Fife at Mar Lodge, near Balmoral, where the rafters of the ballroom are closely packed with hundreds of heads. The stag may no longer have been the exclusive preserve of royalty (although the Duke of Fife was Edward VII’s son-in-law), but it retained an aura of nobility, famously celebrated in Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen.
In the 20th century, Walt Disney put a different spin on deer. Instead of the inherent dignity of the Monarch, whose period of glory will, we know, prove as transient as the mists behind him, he gave us the anthropomorphic schmaltz of Bambi. Since then, perhaps, the Bambi tendency has got the upper hand. We all tend to view deer with a soppiness that, however much we love them, does other creatures much harm.
In terms of biodiversity, the purple-clad, ineffably picturesque Highlands can be a desert. The deer population has exploded since the 1960s, according to Scottish Natural Heritage, and the hills have been nibbled bald of everything except heather, which grows so densely that little can survive underneath. Unlike moose, who browse, like giraffes, on the green tops of trees, deer will munch away the stem of a growing sapling; and they do this on such a scale that hardly any young trees can survive. Deer have no predators in modern Scotland, except man. While stalking culls some of the old stags, the difficulties of reaching deer that are hidden in inaccessible tracts of land has defeated many lairds, who cannot afford the manpower necessary to keep the population boom in check.
Nine years ago, Paul Lister, who owns the 23,000-acre Alladale estate, startled local farmers and ramblers by announcing that he would like to reintroduce an animal that was indigenous to Scotland until hunted to extinction in the 18th century: the wolf. “It’s just an animal that is going to do the job of the rifle. Wolves would keep the deer moving, so they could not get on to a lush area and annihilate it by overgrazing. They would also hunt over those parts of the estate that are impossible to get to – where there are no tracks or anything, so you can’t drag a carcass back.” Without deer, trees would regenerate along valley bottoms, sheltering a myriad of species as they did in the age of the Caledonian Forest.
Lister’s dream has yet to be realised, even in the remote Highlands. In the crowded south of England, wolves would meet even greater resistance. But as many gardeners, lovers of woodland and keepers of nature reserves will know, the deer problem is just as acute, not least because the only two native deer species in Britain – the Red and Roe deer – have been joined by escapees from exotic collections, notably the little muntjac, which, having been brought to Woburn Park in the 1890s, now finds almost as congenial a home in the southern counties of England as it did in the subtropical forests of south-east Asia. It has been called the “ungulate equivalent of the brown rat”.
Like other mammals – foxes, badgers, even otters – which live at the top of their food chain, deer numbers have boomed to the point where tough decisions are in order. Pity the government minister responsible for making them.