Lunch Interrupted

Fallow Deer have been naturalised in Britain for hundreds of years. They have been here on and off going back at least 400,000 years, and one imagines they were wild then. Today's resident Fallow Deer were brought from the eastern Mediterranean sometime around the time of the Norman Conquests. Originally, they were kept in deer parks on grand estates. After a few hundred years, deer parks went out of vogue and they began escaping their walled homes. At one point, they were hunted only by the aristocracy. Today, they are all over the country; these ones, however, are in Bradgate Park, near Leicester. The 800 acre park was deeded to the people of the country back in the 1920s by its last owner, but it started life as the ancestral home of Lady Jane Grey, who died at the hands of her cousin and Queen, Mary in 1554. This young deer is the ancestor of the ones that Lady Jane watched and walked with as a child in the 1540s.
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