Out Of The Woods

At dawn on a still autumn morning, Nick Hammond joins the deer keepers at Woburn Abbey to harvest a fallow buck and enjoy a proper stalker’s breakfast

The sweet, heady tang of chopped timber fills the ride; pine straw, dried brown oak and beech carpet the woodland floor. A nuthatch sits upended on a fissured oak bole, watching us pass. Suddenly, a muntjac barks and the woodland stills. I feel like Blake’s Tyger.

In front of me is a figure, slung with rifle. When he stops to raise his binoculars, I freeze in my tracks. It’s a little past dawn in Bedfordshire, as a swab of gold veneer washes the woods and Tom hewlett turns to me and indicates with his eyes. The bulk of a big fallow buck stalks across the ride away to our left, breath steaming.

He’s too big for us today—a magnificent specimen in the prime of life. Usually, we wouldn’t have known he was there, but he’s in rut and daft with it, too. he inspects our silhouettes, plods past and tosses an antlered head. We move on.

Deer management on the Woburn Abbey estate is a 24-hour-a-day business. Two fulltime deer keepers—including Tom, whose home is tucked, Hansel and Gretel-like, among the woods—scour the farmland and stands of trees that form part of the estate, as well as the grounds of the 3,000-acre deer park surrounding the Abbey itself, not to mention the work needed on the Abbey’s deer-farm business. Another part-time employee flits between both the parks and the deer department.

Manager Dan DeBaerdemaecker and his team race against daylight during winter months to keep on top of the park’s herds of nine different deer species. Deer and Woburn have long been synonymous—herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford, collected more than 42 species, including Chinese water deer and muntjac. About 400 magnificent red deer now roam the woods and pastures here.