Meet the Musgraves by Sydney Chapman Pages 28

Musgrave family brass seal: Musgrave de Edenhall

is perhaps the elaborately engraved walnut and brass stay busk dating from the 18th C. bearing the name ‘Mary Musgrav’, probably a family member. Another vernacular piece is a decoratively engraved horn spoon. On loan and on display at the parish church at Kirkby Stephen is a boar’s tusk said to be from the last wild boar in England, that killed on Wild Boar Fell by Sir Richard Musgrave d. 1464. It was found in his tomb in the Hartley Chapel during restorations in the church in the mid-19th century and is listed among their gifts to the Museum widely reported in the press in 1922. Other items associated with Eden Hall and the Musgrave family gifted more recently is a miniature portrait of Lady Adora (‘Zoe’) Musgrave, mother of Sir Richard, the Museum’s benefactor; after the death of her husband Sir Richard Courtenay Musgrave she married Henry, 3rd Lord Brougham and Vaux, and left Eden Hall to live at Brougham Hall. Ironically both Eden Hall and Brougham Hall would be demolished in the same year, 1934; also a brass seal matrix with the lettering ‘Musgrave de Edenhall’ showing the family heraldic bearings featuring six annulets, and a silver statuette of a knight on a pedestal holding a lance – possibly intended as an elegant toothpick and holder. Other memorabilia include heraldic hand painted place mats, a watercolour of Eden Hall, and photographs and ephemera relating to the Edenhall estate. There are documents relating to Sir Christopher Musgrave dated 1728 in the Museum’s archives, predominantly bills and receipts for goods and works done at Eden Hall.

The Deer of the Eden Valley

No matter where you live in the United Kingdom, the chances are that you are never far from a deer and this is especially true of the Eden Valley. If you happen to be in the right place at the right time and know what to look for, you might just be fortunate enough to be see one.

There are six species of deer living wild in England, and Cumbria plays host to several of them. These include the familiar fallow deer, so often kept in deer parks, with its palmated antlers and a variety of coat colours ranging from the more familiar spotted brown to black and even white, and the secretive sika introduced from Japan over a hundred years ago. There are also occasional reports of the diminutive muntjac, only the size of a springer spaniel and from China, which is now common in the south of England and increasingly seen further north.

It is our two native deer species that you are most likely to encounter in the Eden Valley, though. The first is the stately red deer, Britain’s largest land mammal and the subject of Landseer’s famous ‘Monarch of the Glen’ painting. For most of the year the sexes live apart in separate herds but as the annual rut approaches in autumn they join up for one of the country’s greatest nature spectacles with the stags roaring out their challenges and wrestling with locked antlers for supremacy and breeding rights. By early November it is all over and the herds separate again to face the winter.

In June or July the following year the calf is born and left hidden by its mother who will have withdrawn from the herd to seek solitude and give birth. Camouflaged by a spotted coat it is left alone while its mother goes off to feed before returning to suckle it. If you find one please don’t think that it has been abandoned. As with all deer, mum is probably watching from a safe distance, waiting for you to depart before she returns to her calf.