11 8 British Deer and their Horns 
Drummond Castle, Lord Ancaster’s beautiful seat in Perthshire, is another good 
example of park forest. 
The great wood of Torlum and the neighbouring estates of Strowan and Glenartney 
were tenanted by wild wood stags of great size until the year 1832. During that year the 
Drummond Castle grounds were enclosed, and in the great wood several of the original deer 
were shut in. One splendid head hangs in the lower gallery of the castle, that of a beast 
known as “ the old stag,” which was shot in the wood the following year. I give his 
measurements in addition to those of the two other splendid heads killed by the present Earl 
of Ancaster in 1893 :— 
Points. 
Length. 
Span 
(over all). 
Beam. 
I 2 
34 i 
3 ° 
6 
Wild wood stag enclosed in Torlum 1832, and shot following year. 
I 2 
34 i 
3 2 
r i 
3 2 
Shot by Lord Ancaster in 1893. 
H 
36 
33 
r 1 
32 
Shot by Lord Ancaster in Torlum Wood 1893. Certainly the best 
head in Drummond Castle. 
These heads are all of great beauty and line quality, and much resemble those of the Isle 
of Arran. 
A few years ago I had the pleasure of examining some remarkably line heads of this 
type (in the hands of Mr. Macleay of Inverness). They were sent in by Mr. Smith of 
Ardtornish in Mull. One can scarcely draw a hard-and-fast line between the conditions 
under which these park-forest deer grow their heads and those under which deer live in 
what is called a wild state on some of the islands off the west coast of Scotland. In many 
cases it is true the deer are indigenous, but in most the original breed has died out and has 
been succeeded by modern introductions from the mainland and the south. Take, for 
example, Arran, where the deer are, and have been for the past twenty years, better than in 
any place on the mainland of Scotland. It is now called a deer forest, and the deer are just 
as difficult to kill as those in the Highlands, but as a matter of fact they are restrained within 
certain limits, and the ground was not really afforested till February 1859, when Captain 
Robert Sandeman took fourteen hinds and six young stags from Knowsley Park and turned 
them loose near Brodick Castle. Arran heads are now classed as wild, but properly speaking 
they are park-forest heads. I have seen many of their grand trophies in the hands of 
M‘Culloch in Glasgow, and they are undoubtedly finer than any mainland heads. 
The best Arran head that has been killed was shot by Mr. Padwick in September 1872. 
The stag weighed 28 stone 6 lbs. clean. Length of horn 42 inches, and span inside 40 
inches. The brows are of extraordinary length—22 inches. It now hangs in Brodick Castle. 
4, 5. WILD STAGS’ HEADS 
English .—-Judging by the beautiful heads that are to be seen in many old English houses, 
notably in the northern counties, those deer must have been very much finer from the sixteenth 
till the eighteenth centuries than they are at the present day, though of course not approaching 
the German giants of the same period. Living, as they did, so much in great woodlands, the 
