Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 46, Vol. I, November 15, 1884

No. 46.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1884.
Deer-stalking has for many a long year been looked upon as the king of sports; and in Scotland, a large area of land has from an early period been occupied by the red-deer and the roebuck. At the present time, as far as has been ascertained by a recent inquiry under Royal Commission, the extent of all the deer-forests in Scotland amounts to about two millions of acres. It is only, however, right to say that the land devoted to these animals could not be more profitably employed. It has been affirmed by practical men that it is scarcely possible to feed even one hardy black-faced sheep on less than six acres of such land, so scant is the herbage. Indeed, some intelligent farmers maintain that it will take a hundred and sixty acres of forest-land to graze a score of these sheep. No person who is even tolerably familiar with the deer-districts of Scotland will gainsay this. The contour, altitude, and climate of a deer-forest quite unfit it for agricultural purposes—the range of ground occupied by these stately animals is of the most miscellaneous description: hill and dale, moor and morass, mountain and glen, with every here and there rocky precipices, and small groups of trees naturally planted, and chiefly of the hardy native birch. In the three chief deer-counties of Scotland, the cultivable area is singularly small in proportion to their total extent. Taking Argyll, Inverness, and Ross-shire as examples, only three hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred and ninety-eight acres are to be found under cultivation, out of an area which covers six million eight hundred and twenty-three thousand and two acres, leaving nearly six and a half millions of acres to be inhabited by sheep, deer, and grouse, and as the site of lochs, rivers, and mountains, and sterile places on which nothing grows and nothing can live.
No authentic statistics are collected in Scotland of the deer which are annually slain in the way of sport; but we are enabled from records which appear from time to time in the public prints, to estimate the number of stags which are killed in the different forests. In the county of Inverness—which may be called the deer-county of Scotland par excellence , in the same way as Perthshire is looked upon as being the representative grouse-producing county of the kingdom—probably about sixteen hundred stags are annually killed. The figure which represents the number of deer in all Scotland, counting animals of all ages, must be very considerable, seeing that, as stated in evidence before the recent Royal Commission, it yields to the sportsman’s rifle four thousand six hundred and fifty stags per annum, and a nearly equal number of hinds. Scrope the deer-stalker, when writing his celebrated work some fifty years since, estimated that in the Forest of Athole, which at that date contained an area of over fifty-one thousand acres, there would be, young and old, between five and six thousand deer. Calculating on that data, there ought now to be found on the two million acres of land at present given over to stags and hinds and their calves, as many as two hundred and twenty-five thousand animals of the deer kind. Each stag which succumbs to the prowess of the stalker has been estimated to cost fifty pounds to the lessee or proprietor of a deer-forest. At that rate, the four thousand six hundred and fifty stags annually killed in Scotland represent a sum of two hundred and thirty-two thousand five hundred pounds paid in the form of rent and other items of expenditure which are yearly incurred. As to the rent paid for particular deer-forests, it varies considerably according to extent and amenities. Some forests contain a large area of ground; and although the rental per acre looks trifling enough—ranging as it probably does from ninepence to double, or in some instances to treble, that sum—the amount soon accumulates and becomes important. For an area of twelve thousand acres, a thousand pounds will frequently be paid. Many Scottish forests are, however, rented at double that sum; and not a few at an even larger rent. In the county of Inverness, for example, there are a dozen which yield a total amount of fully thirty-three thousand pounds, including five of three thousand pounds and upwards, and one of nearly six thousand pounds, of yearly rent. In the counties of Ross, Argyll, Aberdeen, and Perth there are also many forests which command a high price. In the first-named county, we could name twenty that fetch an aggregate annual rent of upwards of thirty-three thousand pounds, or an average of nearly seventeen hundred pounds; while it is no secret that an American gentleman pays a yearly rental for deer-ground in Inverness and Ross of nearly eleven thousand pounds.