A LIVING LEGEND
It may appear to have galloped out of a fairy tale, but the exceedingly rare deer known as a white hart exists in reality as well as in the realms of magic and myth
The mysterious white hart
In the dappled light of the glade, the stag’s senses quicken, his head – the colour of moonlight and crowned by branched antlers – is held high as his nose quivers, detecting notes of danger on the wind. The hunter has seen him from afar, a result of his unearthly white coat providing none of the usual camouflage afforded by nature.
But, rather than releasing an arrow, he lowers his bow. This is not a creature to kill – to do so would be to invite bad luck, for this is a white hart – a creature many believe to have been sent by the gods.
Amazingly, fast forward 11 centuries to the present day and the white hart retains much of the mythical status that enthralled our ancestors. Possibly best known as the UK’S fifth most popular pub name, the image of this ghostly stag is as common as it ever was, and yet the animal itself now largely lies deep in our cultural psyche waiting to break cover again.
Occasionally it does – every few years, newspapers report a sighting in the wild: the last true one was in 2011 in Dorset; before that, there were a handful across the UK, ranging from Scotland to Devon. Even in hard-bitten news cycles, there is a sense that this is still an ‘event’, a glimpse of the only mythological creature in the country to be physically real.
The definition of a white hart is a male red deer that is at least six years old and has been born with a white coat. Hart itself is an archaic word for a stag but, while the term has predominantly fallen out of use, in its white form it endures. Prosaically, its mystical glow is a result of a condition called leucism, which
removes pigment. Unlike an albino, however, the animal has normal eye colouring. It’s a genetic anomaly found in many animals, from blackbirds to squirrels, yet only in the red deer – one of only two true native deer species in the UK – has it become the stuff of myth, superstition and divinity from the earliest times.
“White is a normal colour for a fallow deer, for example, but a very abnormal one for a red deer,” says Charles Smith-jones from The British Deer Society. “The ‘white harts’ that you see on pub signs are frequently fallow deer. You can tell the difference by the antlers – the fallow deer has palmated antlers (shaped like an open palm), whereas the red deer’s has standard rounded tines.”
Dazzling white herds of deer – albeit fallow – are indeed maintained today in places such as Houghton Hall in Norfolk. However, it is the act of happening upon a true white hart in the wild that is the stuff of legend. “Without doubt you’d have to be astonishingly lucky,” Charles says.
One person who was fortunate enough to have such luck was Fran Lockhart, a former park ranger for the John Muir Trust. Fran saw a white hart on the Knoydart Peninsula, in the northwest Scottish Highlands (located fittingly between the Loch of Heaven and the Loch of Hell) in 2008. “Local people knew where it was, but it was a bit of a secret,” she says. “When you live in a touristy place, you are selling your surroundings, but there was a sense that this was ‘theirs’ and they felt quite privileged. There was a white hart on the Isle of Arran when I was a child, which I remember my
dad telling me about, and I had built up a romantic notion in my head. I managed to pick out a herd on a hillside and the Knoydart hart was in among them. He wasn’t brilliant white, but he did stand out a mile. Unfortunately, the herd sensed me and ran away, but he was spotted in the area for a couple of years after that.”
It’s a sign of the significance of Fran’s sighting that it sparked not just national but international interest in the media. “I must have done half a dozen interviews,” she says. “I even did one for Australian radio. It all went a bit mad. I think red deer, in particular, symbolise a sort of wildness that really captures the imagination. It’s also our biggest native animal, so that in itself makes it quite special.”
The telling and retelling of sightings of the white hart, and its significance, is certainly not a new phenomenon. The Celts considered them to be messengers from the afterlife, linked with the god Cernunnos and folklore figure Herne the Hunter. Later, in medieval lore, the hart came to symbolise man’s quest for spiritual knowledge. In both cases, though, the white hart was always leading man onward, to pursue it into another plane of existence.
Historically, those who encountered a white stag often described profound spiritual changes that could have great consequences
A white hart in Bushy Park, Surrey, where deer have been allowed to roam freely since
Henry VIII hunted there. In the wild however, they remain elusive
– in some instances, even leading to the creation of kingdoms. Christianity later reinterpreted seeing one to symbolise Christ’s presence on earth – the story of David I, King of Scotland, being fundamental to this. Upon being charged by a white hart, legend has it that he called out to God and the deer’s antlers turned into a cross. The animal vanished – and David established a shrine (which subsequently became the Palace of Holyroodhouse) where he stood. Later, Richard II adopted the white hart, with a golden crown around its neck, as his heraldic badge to symbolise a pious kingship – the most famous image of this being on the 14th-century Wilton Diptych, now in the National Gallery.
Today, the white hart’s story lives on in more ways than we may realise – from books such as The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, where the children chase one back through the wardrobe from Narnia, to Harry Potter’s ‘Patronus’, or ‘protection spell’, depicted as a ghostly white stag that links him to his father in the afterlife. There is even a reference in Game of Thrones.
For mythology expert Jane Bailey Bain, the white hart’s symbolism is as alive as it ever was. “The white hart is often seen as representing nature, which is increasingly endangered. As such, it is an emblem of preserving something pure and deserving of protection – and continues to be something that can show us the way to a higher state of being. One doesn’t hunt the white hart to kill it… one hunts it because it will lead you somewhere.”