Stalking on your doorstep

There is no need to head to Scotland to enjoy the thrill of the stalk. Pursuing lowland deer is not only exciting and surprisingly accessible but essential to the health of the British countryside

-  Graham Downing

IN THE autumn of 1971 my father leased 1,000 acres of forestry shooting near Thetford in Norfolk for what even in the immediate aftermath of decimalisation was the remarkably modest price of five pence an acre. As well as a decent population of wild pheasants, there were vague and unsubstantiated but nonetheless exciting rumours that the woods harboured roe deer, so I called in at our local gunshop, Darlows of Norwich, bought a bag of SG shot and loaded up a dozen cartridges.

For the next few seasons, as my father and I walked the rides and hunted out the bracken and brambles between the blocks of dark, brooding pines, I kept No 6 shot in the right chamber of my shotgun and SG in the left, in the hope of bagging a buck. However, although we retained the shooting for a few years thereafter, there was never so much as a sniff of a deer. How different it is in those woods half a century later.

A surfeit of deer

Thetford is today renowned for its roe, its muntjac and of course its splendid multipointed red stags but right across East Anglia, and indeed throughout most of lowland England, there are deer just about everywhere. After having been hunted virtually to extinction by the middle of the 18th century, wild deer populations have burgeoned. I know of ancient oakwoods where the gnarled and venerable trees had not seen deer beneath their branches since the days, 400 years or more ago, when they were mere saplings but which now do so again. Here on my own small farm in east Suffolk I can open the window on a quiet October evening and hear the thrilling roar of the red stags as they challenge for supremacy during the rut. That would have been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago.