Hotel Hit Squad: Why a wild encounter at Bovey Castle's new deer park will make you doe-eyed for Dartmoor
"Here they come!” Victoria boomed from behind the wheel of her mini tractor, as she scattered sugar beets on the grass in her wake. Nothing happened at first. Then there was the quiet thud of hooves and a cloud of brown dust in the distance. I felt like I could have been in the Serengeti watching the start of a stampede of wildebeest – were it not for the backdrop of weeping willow trees, and rolling green hills stitched with blackberry bushes.
A river of deer thundered into the field, chasing after the tractor and licking sugar beets off the ground. I stood in the middle of the meadow watching it all unfold and inspecting the different characters: a pushy buck using his antlers to nudge competitors out of the way; skinny adolescents with freckled coats like Bambi struggling to keep up with the tractor, and fawns looking for mothers in the excited turbulence.
I was at Victoria and Mark Heyes’s recently opened deer park at Bovey Castle, a five-star pile in the mist-cloaked depths of Dartmoor National Park. With Britain’s deer population at its highest in 1,000 years and some even unfairly branding them “the new foxes”, there has never been a better time to get to know these famously shy and elusive animals up close.
“They’re very vivacious when they are in their element,” said Victoria.
When your experience of deer has been limited to venison burgers and the odd blotch of brown darting between the trees in Richmond Park, the Bovey deer are a genuine shock. Some were knocking antlers playfully; a few females started feeding their fawns, kicking away other cheeky young intruders trying to snatch at their milk. And – my word – the noise they make: it’s a loud, gravelly, belly wail, like water gurgling down the sink. I’d heard the mysterious noise the night I arrived at Bovey, and joked about whether it was the Hound of the Baskervilles loose on the moors.
Some of the fawns are temporarily reared away from their mothers in sheltered accommodation behind the castle – some because their mothers aren’t producing enough milk; one called Coco was rescued after being attacked by a fox. Guests can feed them, too, and sitting with them for a half-hour watching them bury their damp noses in my grain-piled palms, and turn their heads away to sneeze every so often, was joyful and calming.
The deer park is the newest addition to a country house full of activities. It’s the kind of place where you can feed the resident ferrets, collect eggs from the hens and watch an eagle display on the lawn, all before tucking into your Bircher muesli at breakfast. Afternoons can be spent shooting clays, doing archery, playing golf or swimming in the art deco-tiled spa.
That said, at Bovey Castle, the moments of deepest contentment often involve doing very little at all: like taking tea in the drawing room with its cornicing so thick that the walls look like they’ve been attacked with whipped cream, while the resident grey Asian parrot, Beeky, wolf whistles at guests passing through. Or sipping whisky by the fire in the bar, while peering out of huge mullioned windows at the Bovey deer strolling across the sunset-reddened hills.
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The Heyes’s deer park is also a working farm, so there is plenty of venison on the menu at Bovey. I couldn’t quite stomach the venison burgers in the brasserie, Smith’s, so I opted instead for the fun “hog board” instead, with pigs’ head fritters and giant shells of crackling.
The three-AA Rosette Great Western is worthy of getting dressed up for – though avoid anything a shade of indigo. From the plum-coloured velvet tablecloths to the shimmery violet chairs, it’s as close I’ve seen to a restaurant impersonating a Quality Street. Thankfully, the tasting menu pulls off eccentricity with more elegant aplomb: lobster is served on a slab of glass with a quirky sprinkling of buttermilk crunch; the cheese course is adventurously stripped down to a dollop of truffle-infused Blue Devon mousse, flecked with walnuts and studded with pear.
I felt slightly bad that I was too exhausted to brave the bar at the end of the night. But when I spotted the deer from the bay window in my bedroom, I knew I’d made the right the decision. I made myself a pot of camomile tea, and watched the animals I had fed and stroked just hours earlier being slowly swallowed by the autumn dusk.
Doubles from £219 including breakfast. Deer park from £12.50pp; fawn feeding from £30pp
