NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley
MY daughter announced ‘Oh look a moose’ as we entered the grounds of Tatton Park. She was wrong, of course, as she had glimpsed a stag, one of the Red Deer that roam the park of the National Trust property.
Later we went on a walk with the grandchildren to see if we could find them.
It did not take too long and a mob of deer – to use the collective noun – wandered past seemingly unconcerned.
Tatton has a reputation as being one of the largest deer parks in the country and deer have existed here since the 13th century.
Red deer are a native species, having migrated to Britain from Europe 11,000 years ago.
They are the largest mammal in the UK and were used extensively by early man as a source of food, skins, and tools (bones and antlers).
However, the development of agriculture cleared areas of forest to make way for fields and this loss of forest encouraged the decline of red deer, which became largely confined to the Scottish Highlands, south-west England and a few other small, scattered populations.
The Normans protected deer in parks and forests for hunting and that time Cheshire comprised of a number of forests that surrounded Tatton Park including Macclesfield and Peak Forests to the south and east Mara and Mondrem Forest to the north and the west.
Only a fragment of Mara exists in the Delamere Forest near Frodsham.
These became royal hunting grounds in the past with Edward I in the 14th century and James I 300 years later described the area as a ‘delectable place’ while hunting in 1617.
Living in a rigorously protected environment placed difficulties on the people who lived in the forests who faced rules on what they could take by way of game.
They could do nothing to interfere with the animals of the chase such as deer. Hunting was restricted to the King and nobility, and those who broke the forest code were cruelly punished.
There is a record of a pardon of a forester Hugh de Frodsham for slaying Robert Cosyn who was caught taking a deer in 1353.
It was shortly after that time that the anonymous poet who wrote ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ and possibly had North Staffordshire connections was active.
The poem includes a lively description of a deer hunt in which the rules on how the animal was to be hunted and the techniques for bringing down the quarry are vividly portrayed.
A modern day translation by the Poet Laureate Simon Armitage describes the butchering of the animal in graphic terms:
“They seized the stomach and the butchered innards were bound in a bundle.
“Next they lopped off the legs and peeled back the pelt and hooked out the bowels through the broken belly.”