Stag Horn Hunt

It's amazing what geeks even normally sane countrymen can be when they're obsessed.  This time of year brings out a competitive streak in several of my near-neighbours who will barely speak to one another until 'The Season' is over, particularly if one is known to have picked up a 'four-atop' or better.  Where one man has walked and found his prize remains secret until the matching 'four-atop' has been found as well.  Stags often drop both antlers quite close to each other.  Maybe they walk round in circles having lost the first because the weight of the remaining one makes straight lines difficult ...

'The Season' has nothing to do with staghunting but everything to do with stag horn hunting. These chaps, and the occasional chapess, wander about their farms - and other people's if nobody is looking - checking anything that looks like a poking-up white twist of branch in case it's really a stag horn.  Before I came here I understood these to be called antlers and the books still tell me this is the correct term but the chaps hereabouts talk resolutely about 'stags' horns'.

The average find might be a couple of feet long with five or six tines coming off the main stem, bit like part of a tree.  Yeah, right, it's a bit of bone innit, what's the attraction?

Once you've held one, marvelled at the weight of it (this was carried - with its partner - on an animal's head?) and let your fingers and thumbs explore the rough parts by the skull attachment and the long smooth grooves along the main stem and the smooth-worn points - you'll understand the attraction. You want to find one too. I know I do - and never have.

The Obsessed know what sort of places are most likely to yield harvest. Deer-leaps, favourite rubbing posts, regular tracks and grazing areas, deer can be creatures of habit their habits have been noted. The searchers know their deer well and can tell you exactly from which stag each horn has come. One chap has got every horn dropped by a particular stag for several years running. I can see how the identification was made - brow, bey, trey (the first three 'tines' off the main bone stem) are the same shape and set as the year before but each year has added another 'atop', branching into the familiar tree shape every child understands as being 'antlers'.

My near-neighbour has probably three hundred stags' horns hanging in singles and pairs, covering wall after wall of his great barn. He never does anything with them, but he knows where each set was found and when - and who has the pair to a single.  His great rival from the next village must have a similar collection but neither will ever give up one single horn to the other so that one of them gets yet another pair.  It's completely beyond reason but they want to go out finding more every year just to add to their collections and they don't care who knows that this madness comes upon them and will afflict them until the day they die.

A visiting American gentleman is reputed to have offered £1000 for a massive pair of horns picked up just over the border in Devon some years ago.  Imagine getting those through check-in at Heath Row.

Every year at Porlock Show there is a stag horn competition and everyone who has picked up an antler or a pair of them, is invited to bring it along and have it judged against all the other findings from that year.  It's taken very seriously and there is always a splendid display - worth going to see if you're in the area on the last weekend of July.

I rode up onto the Moor this evening after work and met up with several groups of deer: none of them sported any antlers - sorry, horns - at all.  Having said that, they were all hinds, so I guess it would've been a surprise if they had.