THE GUN AT HOME AND ABROAD 
IRISH WILD RED DEER 
Red deer were very abundant in Ireland in the Pleistocene Age, and 
the earliest writer on Irish history, an ecclesiastic named Augustine, 
who lived about the middle of the seventh century, mentions wolves, 
deer, wild swine, and foxes as the principal animals of the island. Giraldus 
Cambrensis (A.D. 1183 — 86) does not include them amongst animals 
«o/ found in Ireland. Fynes Morison (1599 — 1603) thus refers to the species: 
“ Yet in many woods they have many Red deer loosely scattered, which 
seem more plentiful because the inhabitants used not to hunt them, but 
only the governors and commanders had them sometimes killed with 
the piece.” Smith, in his “History of Waterford ” (1774), tells us that there 
were a few wild Red deer in the Knockmealdown Mountains, but they 
were then becoming rapidly extinct. Till recently there were a few in a 
wild state in the less inhabited parts of Connaught, Connemara, and 
Northern Cork, but now they owe their preservation to the efforts of the 
Herberts of Muckross and the Earls of Kenmare, in the county of Kerry, 
and these are the only purely wild herds of to-day, those in Roscommon, 
Wicklow and Donegal being the descendants of park deer, and are now 
fenced in. 
On the whole the antlers and bodies of these Irish deer at Muckross and 
Killarney are somewhat finer than those of the Scottish forests, though 
neither so large nor so long as the West of England specimens. But they 
show more “character” than any other British Red deer, conforming as 
they do to the shape of the old Irish type of head with perfectly separated 
crowns of four points each. The average length of the best is not more 
than 32 inches, but fourteen pointers are more common than in England 
or Scotland. The heaviest Kerry stag is said to have weighed 33 st., and 
the late Lord Powerscourt told me that the late Mr Herbert of Muckross 
killed a stag of 30 st., but these weights are, I think, affixed from 
hearsay. The heaviest of which we have an exact weight is one killed 
by Mr Ralph Sneyd during his tenancy of Muckross. It weighed, clean, 
29 st. 10 lb. 
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