A living part of the landscape
The wild goats, deer, cattle and sheep that occupy some of our ancient estates provide a romantic link to the past
Wild deer, goats, cattle and sheep add an extra dimension to the park, says Matthew Dennison
Castle and cattle will thrive together into eternity long after we are gone
Iknow them all,” muses Sir Michael Leighton of the herd of 280 fallow and black deer that graze the deer park of his family home, Loton Park, on the upper reaches of the River Severn in Shropshire. “I’ve looked after them since I was 21, more than 60 years. Life here would be poorer without them: they’re part of the place.”
Loton’s deer are an example of several types of undomesticated animals that graze the parks of British estates. In Loton’s case, their purpose was formerly to provide quarry for the chase. Although the present herd is of mid-18th-century origin – “very new”, according to Sir Michael – the Leightons received royal permission for a deer park at least 500 years earlier. Now, like other privately owned deer herds elsewhere in the country – including those at Knole in Kent, Burghley in Lincolnshire and the white fallow deer on Lord Cholmondeley’s estate at Houghton – their value is aesthetic, even romantic, although they also play a part in maintaining the ecological balance of their immediate environment. The current Lord Sackville, Robert Sackville-west, describes Knole’s deer as “a fundamental part of the aesthetic appearance of the park as well as its ecology”.
In The Breeds of the Domestic Animals of the British Islands, Scottish agriculturalist David Low wrote in 1842 that, “animals become gradually adapted to the conditions in which they are placed, and many breeds have accordingly become admirably suited to the natural state of the country in which they have become acclimated”. Undomestic animals, Loton’s deer nevertheless endorse Low’s statement, self-regulating in terms of numbers and with no incursion of new blood in living memory. Across the British Isles, a handful of estates house similar herds of deer and cattle, flocks of sheep and even goats that, although wild, thrive in landscapes that are more or less enclosed, more or less manmade.
In some instances, these animals play a limited part in the life of an estate or its resident family. Claire Fletcher, chatelaine of the 16,000-acre Ardlussa estate on Jura, off the west coast of Scotland, which her husband’s family has owned for the past century, describes the wild goats that inhabit the estate’s shoreline fringes as so independent in their habits that, unlike Ardlussa’s red deer, they scarcely interact at all with any of the estate’s other occupants, either two- or four-legged. The shaggy-haired, long-coated goats colonise caves along the island’s coast, sheltering there, especially in harsh winters, and grazing on seaweed. “There are no trees where the goats live, they destroy any trees they encounter and all the trees on the estate are fenced,” says Claire Fletcher. “They’re characterful animals, a mixed bag in appearance – brown, black, grey, spotty. I respect their ability to survive in this inhospitable environment with no human intervention. As with Jura’s locals, it takes a certain resilience to live here, which the goats have. But they play no part in my family’s life.” Island legend claims that the goats, with their splendid backward-curving horns, began their life on Jura as flotsam from wrecked ships of the Spanish Armada. For the Fletchers, they add a note of rugged picturesqueness to Ardlussa, albeit – given their shyness – one glimpsed only fleetingly and only in the estate’s furthest, uninhabited reaches.
At Knole, Lord Sackville identifies a close connection between the 400 sika and fallow deer that roam the 1,000-acre park and the spirit of this ancient estate, but a much looser connection between the animals and his own family. “Knole’s is a genuinely
medieval deer park, one of the few such medieval parks to survive. Deer were here when Knole belonged to the archbishops of Canterbury: they’ve been here since long before the Sackvilles. Their existence in the park, a Site of Special Scientific Interest partly on their account, predates anyone’s attempt to create a house or domesticate the landscape. The deer are rightly among Knole’s icons in people’s minds.”
princely landscape
Their presence, Lord Sackville suggests, has a romantic quality, in tune with popular perceptions of Knole. “It reinforces an image of a medieval, even princely landscape.” Unlike his recent forebear, author, poet and gardener Vita Sackville-west, he does not make a link between the deer and his own imaginative life or self-perception, or indeed the spirit of the Sackvilles. Vita, by contrast, discerned reflections of herself, her moods, her emotional vacillations in the handsome animals, “that nightly through the beechwoods bell out their challenge”. In Beechwoods at Knole, written in 1921, she described hearing: “the red deer’s challenge/ Prowling and belling underneath my window,/ Never a cry so haughty or so mournful.”
The deer’s continuing occupancy of a park that attracts up to half a million visitors a year serves the useful purpose of limiting maintenance required, as “the deer themselves do much of the active maintenance”. The herd, however, is actively managed – by park and deer keeper Dom Andrews. At Knole, this management includes a degree of culling to ensure sustainable numbers. At Loton Park, management extends to feeding in hard winters, when the herd receives a sugar beet equivalent from midnovember onwards.
Chillingham Castle in Northumberland is home to Sir Humphry Wakefield. Alongside the castle roam Chillingham’s famous wild cattle, a herd of around 100 short-tempered, short-stature, horned white cattle, the bulls’ faces, necks and shoulders mottled with black or red-brown flecking, which successive observers, including Sir Walter Scott and painter Edwin Landseer, have envisioned for posterity in distinctly heroic fashion. As visitors to Chillingham can vouch, these ancient beasts – sole survivors of Britain’s wild, forest-dwelling cattle – do indeed possess a heroic majesty, bred not as beef or dairy animals but purely for survival. “They’re high romance – and that’s how I view this castle, too – and a completely integral part of the landscape here,” says Sir Humphry. “Castle and cattle are interdependent, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. I am castle curator for my time and the cattle have their changing wardens, but both will thrive together into eternity and long, long after we are all gone.”
For Sir Humphry, living on England’s border with Scotland, a land once much fought over by Border Reivers, Chillingham’s wild cattle embody aspects of the region’s character. “I think all warriors have an independence, with a determination to be free. Maybe that’s what links us all up here. In ancient days, cattle movements revealed the presence of attackers.”
Today, tall trees mean that the cattle are no longer visible from any but Chillingham’s topmost turrets. They occupy a park of
more than 300 acres, landscaped in the 18th century in the manner of Capability Brown, at home among dense stands of beech and streams lined with ancient alders, their rootstock a thousand years old, and what Sir Humphry describes as, “a wonderful froth of birch trees everywhere”. In the dense, brackeny undergrowth cows shelter their calves. They are dangerous animals and have consistently resisted any accommodation close to their human neighbours. For Sir Humphry, their allure is magical: “I have a huge personal attachment to them and they add their mysterious strength to all we achieve at the castle.”
Landseer celebrated the wild cattle’s picturesque quality, massing the heavy-shouldered beasts against purple inclines of bracken frond and rock. Picturesqueness remains among park animals’ purpose. Sir Michael Leighton commends the beauty of Loton’s deer; Lord Sackville and Claire Fletcher describe the animals at Knole and Ardlussa in similar terms. A visitor to Lord Yarborough’s Brocklesby estate in Lincolnshire during the 1840s, Robert Franklin was moved to verse: “Who hath not witness’d, in his wanderings here,” he wrote in The House of Brocklesby, “Those interesting herds of beauteous deer?/ Those somewhat shy attendants on the lawn,/ The brindled doe – or more delightful fawn,/ … Or antler, monarch, tow’ring o’er the rest;/ The noble stag as here beheld of late,/ With horns high rais’d in dignity and state…”
Early in the past century, Scottish landowner Sir Jock Buchanan-jardine developed his own breed of sheep to graze the parkland of his Castlemilk Estate in Dumfriesshire. He used wild French Mouflon, Moorit Shetland and horned Manx Loaghtan to produce a strain of brown-legged, small-footed, horned sheep with coats the colour of milky coffee, the Castlemilk Moorit. Elegant and even dainty, these agile, medium-size sheep produce a fine, pale-brown wool. Their purpose for Sir Jock, however, was primarily aesthetic, a living decoration for Castlemilk’s parkland, as it remains for subsequent owners, including Bernard and Sarah Taylor of Rycote Park in Oxfordshire, who graze Castlemilk Moorits in a landscape designed by Capability Brown.
For their owners, the herds of deer or wild cattle, flocks of goats and sheep that ornament landscaped parks across the British Isles are prized for qualities that make a limited contribution to the financial wellbeing of an estate, beyond potentially serving as a visitor attraction. Instead, these animals connect today’s incumbents to the history of a house, family, estate or landscape, preserving an ancient spirit, a memory of more turbulent, wilder, freer, more expansive times. The white deer at Houghton Hall remind us of the beautifying vision of those builder-noblemen who, in past centuries, enriched rural Britain with a concept of bucolic perfection, in which house, gardens, park, farming and country sports all came together in peaceful, sculpted expanses of greensward, woodland and water.
But it’s not all about arty perfection. The deer at Knole and Loton provide small quantities of venison, Castlemilk Moorits produce wool and hogget meat, Ardlussa’s wild goats clear stretches of Jura’s shoreline of rotting seaweed. Sir Humphry Wakefield had a pair of chaps made from the skin of
Their purpose was primarily aesthetic, a living decoration for the parkland
one of Chillingham’s wild bulls and has hunted, wearing them, with the Percy and College Valley hounds. The cattle are notable for the toughness and thickness of their pale hides – “once useful for making shields”, according to Sir Humphry. Less useful, as it happened, for making chaps, which were so unyielding and unwieldy that Sir Humphry struggled to mount and dismount in his.
Walter Scott once characterised the white park cattle that grazed the Scottish estates of the Duke of Hamilton as, “mightiest of all the beasts of chase that roam in woody Caledon”. Happily for them, today’s park animals enjoy more peaceful existences. They are more likely to be disturbed by a camera lens than the huntsman’s horn.