Helen saw this deer as she came out of her house earlier in the week in the Northcourt area of Abingdon.
A little way behind the fence and ivy is the Boundary House Public House. The deer was startled and ran. Deer and modern traffic don’t mix well so I hope it got home OK.
Deer were better suited to the lower speed days of the stagecoach. Elizabeth sent me this picture of a stagecoach passing down East St Helen Street earlier in the week (on the 11th during the Abingdon Street Fair detour).
Two horse-drawn stagecoaches set out on a 113-mile journey from Windsor Castle to Warwick this week and are currently at Kineton. They stayed at Henley, Dorchester-on-Thames, Stanton Harcourt, Hook Norton and Kineton on the way. Not many Public Houses can cater for a stagecoach and four these days, but I dare say the old coach houses of the Kings Head and Bell and the Crown and Thistle, in Abingdon, would have give them a good place to rest over.
The stagecoaches were raising money for Help for Heroes and The Household Cavalry Operational Casualties Fund.
The two stagecoaches came through Culham on the way from Dorchester to Abingdon – what a sight!
A deer ran into the grounds of St Edmunds school on Wednesday at 8:45am closely missing some children and had to be rescued by Mrs Tiddlywinks. Its not the same one as it had a full set of antlers.
The deer is a fallow pricket, a male that’s less than one year old. The first set of antlers they have are small spikes, they cast these off after a year and then will grow a new fuller set.
Id imagine he’d come down from the bagley wood / Sunningwell area.
There were actually 2 deer – that one and a male with a full set of antlers, both of which we spotted about 10 minutes apart in the gardens of the houses behind the Spread Eagle on Northcourt Road that morning. No idea where they came from!
Saw the deer at St Edmunds when he ran across the playing fields – it was a big beast with a fine set of horns. The kids were kept indoors all day until he was rescued.