What is a deer park?

What a deer park is

A few parks existed before the Norman Conquest, but it was the Norman aristocracy's taste for hunting that led to most of them being made, and Domesday Book (1086) records 36. Historic England dates the peak period of laying out parks to between AD 1200 and 1350 and estimates that the original number probably exceeded 3,000. Parks ranged from about 3 to 1,600 hectares, their pales usually followed a rounded, curving course, and some had deer leaps, which let deer into the park but not out. Many medieval parks were later turned into farmland or absorbed into the landscape parks of the 18th century.

How deer parks look on LiDAR

A park pale shows as a long bank with a ditch on its inner side, following a smooth, curving course that encloses a large area and often cuts across later field boundaries. A local relief model shows ploughed-down stretches of the bank, and sky-view factor shows the ditch, which helps to confirm that it lies inside the bank. Inside the park, earthworks such as lodge sites, fishponds, pillow mounds and earlier monuments that escaped ploughing may also show.

See LiDAR visualisations explained for what each method shows.

What can look like one

Woodland boundary banks, parish and estate boundaries, hedge banks and prehistoric linear earthworks can look like a park pale. Woodland banks usually have the ditch on the outside, while a pale usually has it on the inside, although some pales have an external ditch.

Protection

Some park pales are scheduled monuments and many parks lie within registered parks and gardens, and Historic England considers well-preserved, well-documented deer parks to be of national importance.

Examples on the LiDAR

Where they are

Counties with the most deer parks that have a page here.

More examples