Safety in numbers for historic incomer

Unlike those deer species that arrived on these islands as hitch-hikers in the wake of Britain’s 19th-century trading empire, the fallow deer (Dama dama) has a much more complex history.

Present in prehistoric Britain until the onset of the last ice age, when it became confined to refugia in the eastern Mediterranean, fallow deer were reintroduced here not by the Normans, as most authorities once believed, but by the Romans.

This was confirmed recently when archaeologists working on the Roman palace at Fishbourne, Sussex, identified a number of fallow bones, including two jaw bones. The teeth were subjected to strontium isotope analysis, which