This article is taken from the November 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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We turned to watch the last truck from the quarry clatter its way down the dusty lane, out through the gates, and away towards Stamford. They’ll tell you that the countryside is quiet, that it’s all tranquility, birdsong, and church bells pealing somewhere in the distance but it’s not true. Rural Britain is a place of work. Chainsaws whine, lambs separated from their mothers bleat, and lorries tear down the lanes. When I was young, a logging lorry ran over my dog. She was sunbathing on the tarmac one hot July morning.

Deer populations in Lincolnshire, particularly muntjac and fallow, are rapidly increasing

“Limestone they’re quarrying,” Jamie Tusting said to me, as he pushed the .243 rounds into his rifle, “Mick George the guy’s called. Massive business now,” and then, ducking below the canopy of low hanging oaks, he set off into the woods.

Not long ago, a land agent — essentially an estate manager — was often a mid-witted relative of the family in the big house, but things have changed. Estates are complex businesses and having served three drunken years at the Royal Agricultural College no longer cuts it. Jamie was at Durham first and a Norfolk land agent I spoke to recently told me their masters at agricultural college was a bit of a cultural disappointment after their undergrad degree in literature.

There was a storm due the following morning, but there was warmth in the wind, and the rooks, as we wandered through the trees, drifted back to their roosts. The woods around us were thin — the understorey had been browsed out by deer and you could see 100 yards in every direction.

A month previously, in a meeting with the Forestry Commission, Jamie had been told that the 130 head of deer they were shooting each year on the 15,000 acre estate wasn’t enough. Deer populations in Lincolnshire, particularly muntjac and fallow, are rapidly increasing and the meeting concluded with a new annual cull target of 300.

Squirrels scratched acorns into the dry woodland floor and pigeons burst from the firs, but there were no fallow beneath the trees or muntjac crossing the rides. “Irritating,” Jamie said, as we stood in the shade of an alder buckthorn at the end of the wood, looking out over a large recently drilled field. He’d been out every evening for the past four days and had just one muntjac in the chiller to show for his time.

For twenty minutes, we waited, hoping that a buck would cross the ground in front of us but the breeze picked up and nothing showed. Deer don’t like the wind. It affects their ability to hear the bear and the wolf and the lynx, all those predators long since gone.

With half an hour of light left, we changed tack. Jamie reckoned that if we were to shoot anything, it would be in one of the sheltered fields by the road. As we retraced our steps his phone lit up. An old boy nearby had been cleaning the head of a large fallow buck that Jamie had shot the previous week and he’d sent a picture. Jamie held his phone out to me so I could see the trophy. “Massive, isn’t it?” — he spoke like a child looking at a creature in the zoo.

Deer don’t like the wind. It affects their ability to hear the bear and the wolf and the lynx, all those predators long since gone

We crossed the old railway line and grabbed at the spindly beeches as we slid down a slope pockmarked with mossy holes where there had once been rabbits. At the bottom, we clambered up into a two-man high seat, built to provide cover and a steady platform for a rifle.

Fallow are big beasts and they often travel in groups, which is one of the reasons they do so much damage to young trees – but they often just seem to apparate. I didn’t see the fawn and the doe until they were just 50 yards away, and a month out of season. “Some people think we should just plough into them all year round,” Jamie shrugged, as we watched the fawn gambolling along behind its mother, “but you’d have to be a bit of a dick.”

On my way home, just after Huntingdon, a muntjac lay dead at the side of the road, its face shrivelled and its insides spilled out across the tarmac. It’s very easy to scribble down “300 head” in a meeting but it’s another thing altogether to get it done.

It certainly is possible though (night vision scopes, thermal spotters, and even drones to locate herds are increasingly part of deer management) and licences can be acquired to drive all night, killing beasts from the warmth of your truck. The woods would do well but I wonder how long it would take before Jamie stopped bothering to put those antlers up on his wall.