This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
A couple of weeks back, I overheard a pretty well known TV chef and occasional hunter say that he’s never really understood hanging a deer head on the wall. To him, he went on, it’s all about harvesting fine meat from beautiful places.
To some extent, I get where he’s coming from. There are few greater pleasures than serving up some exceptional roebuck steaks from an animal that was shot less than a mile away from wherever it is you’re eating it, or packaging up a whole muntjac (as I’ve been doing a bit lately) to send to somebody in London who wants to eat meat more sustainably.
I, too, understand the antipathy towards the notion of “the trophy hunter”. There’s nothing pretty about bloated, sunburned plutocrats grinning over the corpse of a freshly-dead elephant. That said, just yesterday I was standing in the garden in Norfolk, under a willow tree, with a roebuck head on a rolling boil over a camping stove. The whole process of getting the flesh off a deer skull is a relatively quick one, but anybody who has done it themselves will know that it’s an activity best undertaken outside. The smell, although not totally unpleasant, lingers long in the kitchen.
It was one of those beautiful early autumn mornings when geese are in the sky, the dew lies heavy, and out in the fields there are cock pheasants calling. As the water boiled, and the church bell in the village chimed 9am, I watched the very last of the swallows perched above the house on a telephone wire, readying themselves for their 6,000-mile flight.
One of the antlers is longer than the other, and the whole thing is pretty small
I picked the skull out of the pot, wiped it down, dried it, carried it inside and placed it on an old wooden table that I got from a local attic sale.
It’s not the sort of “trophy” that would end up on the wall in a multimillionaire dentist’s lounge. One of the antlers is longer than the other, and the whole thing is pretty small.
It’s said that roedeer almost disappeared from East Anglia by the late 19th century, having been hunted to near-extinction. Indeed, the creatures we have today are descended from roe that were brought over from Wittenberg, a historic region in Saxony with the river Elbe running through it.
The deer that were brought over were modest and consequently most of the roe in Norfolk, in spite of them having plenty to eat, are modest still. And yet I don’t really think of them as modest at all. They are all beautiful in different ways, and their heads — whether they are malformed or whether they’re very small or have one antler — are what make the bucks individuals.
“You wouldn’t put that on the wall,” a local gamekeeper said to me recently when I showed him a picture of one of these heads. “Absolutely I would,” I replied, and I told him why. The meat gets eaten, almost every last bit of it. Some by me and much of it by a growing number of customers at the local shop, but I like to remember the deer I’ve shot.
In a couple of weeks’ time, I’ve got a whole “shoulder mounted” head coming back from a brilliant local taxidermist. The process, when it comes to shoulder mounting, is a highly skilled and lengthy one — the skin has to be tanned, a mould of the head and shoulders created — and then it’s all stitched back together again.
There are fewer taxidermists around these days and commissioning them, as well as being an exercise in delayed gratification, can be fiercely expensive. But it’s worth it, I think. There is immense beauty in deer in the field, venison on the plate, and deer heads on the wall.
I’m generally a bit down on people who go on about claiming to worship trees and rivers: it seems a bit contrived and fey. But perhaps preparing a roebuck head in your garden to be fixed to a piece of local oak or having a taxidermist painstakingly prepare a head for wall hanging isn’t really so different. If people want to throw deer heads away to avoid the ire of those who hate the notion of “trophy hunting” that’s fine, I suppose. But aesthetically, it seems a bit wasteful.
