The Wild Cattle of Chillingham

It's a bit of a mystery where the cattle came from. About 800 years ago the king granted the family here a right to create a castle and crenelate and with that came the right to create this park and so they created the park and the idea of the park was really to hold red deer. I mean the red deer were well they weren't sacred but they were definitely a gift of the king and if you went and killed or hunted a red deer without the permission of the king it was going to go badly for you and you're probably going to lose your your life possibly a few other bits on the way and so to suddenly have this park for the family here it was it was a big deal and so they they created the wall and then at some stage they must have come and sort of shut all the gates or whatever they'd created and they caught the red deer but they also caught these cattle and the mystery is what were the cattle doing roaming around here when we know that cattle have been domesticated in this country for at least 5,000 years possibly six so why were the cattle in the woods? No one really knows. The cattle have been here for about 800 years and more and for the first few hundred years of their existence here that they served no agricultural purpose really what they were here for was hunting and to be hunted so they needed them wild last thing you want if you're going out hunting a hunting an animal and trying to prove how tough and manly you are is something that's tame you want something that's stroppy so they they kept them stroppy they didn't allow any any sort of domesticated breeds to get in amongst them and even during the agricultural revolution they did not interfere with them they were lucky there was a rather special man around here at the time called Bailey who saw that these cattle were actually a sort of pure breed and should be kept that way and for all he was a leading light in the agricultural revolution and improving breeds of sheep cattle and pigs he he made sure that these cattle stayed pure but on top of that he persuaded the landowner that actually the cattle should be and and put into this bit of ground up here a special sort of wild area would be put aside for them and so they they turfed the farmer off who was here and they found another farm for him and they pulled his house down and they pulled his his his buildings down from what they were I don't know 200 years ago probably not a lot and they pulled all the fences down and leveled it all and then they did all the planting that we can see and the idea was to create this sort of natural environment for this this herd of animals and this is the only park in the country that was laid out for an animal currently there are 100 cattle here about and there's another reserve herd up in north of Scotland with about 25 or 30 and the idea is that at some stage if ever these came to grief the park could be restocked with the herd in the north but these cattle are remarkably healthy they get absolutely no medication at all all we do as regards to interfering is giving them a little bit of hay in the winter but not not a huge amount and they uh they're tough you know these calves imagine a calf born in July it'll it'll get milk through the autumn probably around Christmas its mother will run out of milk that calf will survive right through the winter on the little bit of hay it gets and picking and there's I don't think any domestic breed could probably cope with that and they they just they're tough they're good little grazers and they're remarkably healthy when it comes to to breeding as you can see there are a lot of bulls here in fact half the cattle are males and half the cattle are females nothing is castrated so when it comes to breeding it's really left to the you know the the bigger better bulls are are the ones that do the breeding but of course because they're so inbred and they're virtually they're virtually clones there's not a huge difference in size between any of them so most of them they get to a certain age they think they're top dog and so we can have some really good ding dong battles and they sometimes last just a few seconds occasionally they last a whole afternoon but but it's uh it's a tough life being a bull if you want if if if you have love in your heart you're gonna have to work for it and uh and they they get some scrapes occasionally get some serious injuries but um they can really wear themselves out fighting and chasing chasing the females around