Aristocracy

Turning inland from the coast, which we visited in our last post, we pass through Holkham village, which was built to house some of the workers from the Hall and its surrounding estate in the eighteenth century. The "cottage" below must have been for an important member of the Hall's staff.

We take the road through the ornate gates to Holkham Hall itself - a building so large, incidentally, that a previous owner's wife trained two Labrador dogs to track and take messages to her husband, wherever he might be in the vast building. But it's not the human aristocracy that I'm trying to find.

No, the real nobility here is the herd of Fallow Deer. You only have to look at the haughty bearing of the buck in the centre of the picture above to see who is the true lord of all he beholds.

The herd has occupied the park for over two hundred years and, like many of the human nobility, they can trace their ancestry back to the Norman invasion. There's even evidence that they were here earlier than that, having been first introduced to Britain by the Romans; so the Normans merely re-introduced the species to England.

Having got here they strutted around, both the Normans and the Fallow Deer, as if they owned the place.

They are medium-sized deer standing perhaps a metre tall at the shoulder and weighing around 50 Kg, though the males may be bigger. There are four basic colour types: Common - which are tan coloured with white spots, but which fade to a mostly grey colour during winter; Menil - which are slightly paler with white spots, and which remain that colour throughout the year; Melanistic - which are almost totally black or dark brown; and White - which are very pale and get more white with age, but they are not true albinos.

The deer are confined to the park but live as wild animals within it, though they do need more management and intervention than some other breeds to maintain a healthy population. And since there are visitors to the park throughout the year they are not much fazed by people taking photos of them, provided you keep a respectful distance.

Most of these pictures were taken with a lens giving 9x magnification and many have been further cropped to give the shots you see here.

In theory I shouldn't have to travel so far to take pictures of Fallow Deer; there's a small population of them, including occasional pure white animals, living around my home area. I see them from time to time from the hides on my local nature reserve, or else way, way across the fields. They are extremely wary and flighty though.  

My local deer are descended from those that escaped from deer parks centuries ago. They cause a good deal of damage to woodlands, gardens and nature reserves, particularly to young plants and trees.

Here in the parkland around Holkham Hall newly planted trees can be fenced off until they are established enough to withstand a bit of nibbling during winter when the grazing is less plentiful.

In the heyday of these parks the deer were kept to be hunted and a buck with a fine set of antlers would have been a sought after prize. They still are, but only for an old chap with a camera. Rather than take flight, this individual gave me a long, bored look, posed for a bit then wandered off unconcernedly.

And there we'll leave these aristocrats of the Norfolk countryside. One day I may even get around to visiting the Hall.

Take care.