The Last Stag of Hatfield Chace
Myths and Memories
When I was growing up there was a pub at the end of the lane called the Hatfield Chace. It’s still there in fact. But in those days, back in the 1970s, it had a big free standing sign outside with a beautiful stag on the top. I’ve searched in vain for an image of the sign but it only seems to exist in my memory now. I believe the stag was standing over a depiction of the landscape in which he was killed. Legend, or at least my mother’s stories, had it that the Chace pub was built on the spot where the last stag in the ancient Hatfield Chase hunting forests was killed. Again, I can find no trace of this story but I was probably five or six when I first heard it and it has stayed with me these fifty years.
The story of the stag and the link of an ancient story to a specific site came back to me today when I took an early walk to beat the heat of a beautiful June day. I was reflecting on my St Hugh’s landscape project, the stories I have discovered so far and the fictional stories which are starting to bubble up out of all my research and conversations. And it struck me how deeply the stories are rooted in the land and how the changes in the landscape can be mapped alongside those stories. The more I read and learn, the more the landscape makes sense to me and the louder the voices of both past and present speak. Pot sherds, which I find on every walk through the fields around Low Burnham, now bring images of the waves of dwellers in this land, the food they ate, the tools they used, each succeeding generation laid like a palimpsest on those who went before.
Today I stood at the top of the High Burnham hill, the highest point in the Isle of Axholme and thought about the history I have learned and it was as though I was watching a timelapse film – Paleolithic hunter gatherers passing through with their tools of antler and of bone, followed by the Mesolithic with their bows and arrows, the Neolithic who began to settle, to learn the basics of farming and to leave their dead buried in the land. The Bronze Age farmer passed through carrying votive offerings to the Holy Well and Iron Age tribesmen, enclosed their villages with wooden stockades. I could see the fear of the invading Romans who never settled on this land but must have passed across the trackless marshes dropping coins as they went, which were discovered centuries later, tying their time to ours. Corieltauvi tribespeople subsumed by Saxons and Angles, the Isle becoming a battleground between Mercia and Northumbria, the land tugged between the two kingdoms and then the Vikings came and the Isle was part of the Danelaw. I saw fur clad Danes settle and intermarry, and their blood become the blood of the Isle.
Normans came and churches and priories and a castle rose, monks moved across the land, rich men built their houses and, bordering the Isle, the Hatfield Chace was designated a Royal hunting park. Time speeds along and Dutchmen arrive to drain the land, the waters recede and farmland emerges from the mists, the Isle begins to resemble the place I know. And at some point the last stag died in the Chace and the legend came down through the centuries to me.
I could have continued to watch the timelapse film, the coming of two world wars which left their traces in the fields and on the families of the Isle, the intensification of agriculture, the felling of hedges the increasing size of the farm machinery. Right down to this spring and the endless rain which has left so many of the summer fields, usually green and waving with wheat and barley at this time of year, barren and arid.
I have realised what perhaps should have been self evident, that every part of this landscape has been shaped by the stories of the people who lived here and the stories have been shaped by the land. The tales and myths which have emerged here are different to those which are told in hilly, enclosed or mountainous regions. Here human endeavour is open to the sky, the mysteries hidden in the water and the mist, secret spirits haunt the rivers and the wells.
In remembering the sign of the last stag I realise that I have been fascinated by how stories of the land persist and shape us since I was a child. Only the story of the last stag doesn’t seem to be told any more and the sign for the pub no longer has a stag at all, the name lacking any meaning now. And it feels as though people are losing their connection to their stories and the reasons the land is shaped the way it is. Without our stories we lose a link to the land and without that link we cease to care quite so much. But the land matters. It is where we live and without it we are untethered, back to being nomads in an increasingly alien landscape. It makes it all the more important to me to capture some of those old stories and to retell them before they are lost forever.