Dear Fencing
As rural stock fencing goes, deer fencing is dear fencing.
Deer are intelligent animals, and very good at jumping over things. In Britain, if you really need to keep deer where you want them, then fences need to be at least 1.5m (c 5’) high or, for bigger beasts like Red deer, over 1.8 m (at least 6’). That’s a lot of wire and posts.
Cattle, on the other hand, can be corralled by a fence of not much more than a metre high (say just under 4‘); definitely cheaper.
Fences are built to keep things either in or out. This may seem self-evident but there is a difference between ‘in’ and ‘out’. Terroir particularly likes the American situation. Apparently, in America prior to the mid-20th century, the law required those living in most of the western, or ‘open range’, states to fence out their neighbours livestock, while land owners in eastern and mid-western states had to fence in their flocks and herds. It’s a subtle but important weighting of agricultural priorities (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_fencing).
In Britain, most people are probably fencing to keep deer out - of gardens, allotments, motorways or young woodland planting. But the British love of hunting means that sometimes it is perceived as necessary to fence deer in.
Take the example of Penmon, a limestone promontory on the easternmost extremity of Anglesey, with views across the Menai Straits to Llanfairfechan, Penmaenmawr. Llandudno and (image right) to the Great Orme.
This historic landscape is full of stories and bears witness to a whole variety of communities and lifestyles. Many visitors come here, despite the continued existence of a toll on the access road to some of the best bits. Penmon was also the backdrop to a February reunion of Terroirs North and South. But using local knowledge, we walked over from the village, toll-free.
Let’s start with a little tour and work around to the deer issue. Penmon Lighthouse, one of five working lights around the coast of Angelsey, is a good place to start.
Image left: Penmon lighthouse with Puffin Island (left) and the Great Orme (behind)
As befits a hinterland of rocky limestone, the shore is stony but it’s a great place for dog walkers, big and little kids and beach combers. It’s a good place for watching seabirds, if only they would stay still long enough to be identified. We’ve also seen dolphins here but nothing doing today.
Far, far older than the lighthouse, however, and a little further down the coast, is the big draw at Penmon: the cluster of medieval ecclesiastical buildings around St Seiriol’s church.
Although there is earlier, archaeological, evidence of human activity here (from flint tools to Romano-British field banks), it is the tangible, stone, medieval solidity of the church and associated buildings which forms the historic core of this landscape. With an associate foundation on Puffin Island, the monastic centre at Penmon appears to once have been of great significance in the area. Two unusual 10th or 11th century decorated crosses now shelter in the church, and it is thought that there may once have been others. The church itself was rebuilt, in stone, in the 12th century, and included some very fine Romanesque detailing. In the 12th/13th centuries, monastic reform led to significant additional building as well as the transfer of the order to the Augustinians.
Inevitably, Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries ended the ecclesiastic tradition at Penmon and, by 1565, the estate was leased by one Sir Richard Bulkley. The church was retained as a parish church, and further buildings added, including the very splendid dovecote (see view pictured earlier) which is thought to date to around 1600.
The dovecot contains an unusual central, stepped pillar (below right), and someone has counted all those nesting holes: it’s reckoned to be around 930. Terroir has no wish to challenge that count.
The peninsula which is Penmon is nothing if not varied in landuse, so the widespread and long term occurrence of limestone quarrying comes as no surprise. Although those sheep do look a little puzzled, as though someone removed the rest of their field only yesterday.
The quarries were once extensive and the stone was shipped out by boat; the infrastructure of quarry buildings, inclined planes, a steam powered mill and a pier, is still visible. The stone was used to produce, amongst other things, lime, flux for steel production and ‘Anglesey Marble’ (as witnessed by the image below left). Quoi? Some basic internet research reveals that the latter is, yes, made from polished Anglesey limestone, and produces a decorative leopard skin pattern. Thanks to https://historypoints.org/index.php?page=former-limestone-quarries-penmon for explaining that little conundrum.
But not all the limestone was exported.
What do you do if you have recently acquired an estate made available thanks to King Henry’s views on religion? You enjoy your new acquisition. You probably show off a little and have extravagant social gatherings. These would probably include hunting parties and the creation of a new deer park. The park is big, probably more than 400 acres (over 160 ha). But you need to ensure that there are plenty of deer present at all times (can’t have them wandering off your land, or swimming over to Puffin island just as all your influential friends turn up). So, yes, you need to fence it.
We rounded a corner, and this is what we saw: the most monumental deer fence/wall that Terroir South has ever seen. Even if you have your own limestone quarry, you have to wonder how much that cost to erect. No surprise that, today, much of it is in a poor state of repair.
Six foot of post and wire just doesn’t have the same cachet.
With thanks to http://www.heneb.co.uk/hlc/penmon/penmon4.html for such an informative Historic Landscape Characterisation report.