GLEN VAUDREY: Irish Elk

Glen is one of the newer additions to the bloggo family. He wrote to me out of the blue last year to ask whether we wanted a Western Isles volume in our Mystery Animals of Britain series. We agreed that we did indeed want one, and commissioned him. What we were not expecting was such a bloody good writer and all-round nice guy, who - by the way - is writing several other volumes for us. Wayhay!!

I think Dale could be onto a winner with proof of late survival of the Irish elk. It is not just in cave paintings and ancient gold that the sight of a large antlered animal can be found. There is also a long-antlered beast appearing on the coins of the Ambiani. This tribe was to be found in ancient Gaul. Today the area is the Somme valley in modern day France.

Knowing the tribe is, in many ways, quite handy in dating the coin. For after Caesar’s conquest the tribes of ancient Gaul stopped issuing coins; they were not needed as they were now part of the Roman Empire, which, while it may have meant a good deal of misfortune for the tribes involved, does, however, provide us with a good end date: around 50BC at the latest. Using this date, it is then possible to have an educated guess at the age of the coin and from that, the possible age of the animal modeled upon it.

The coin in question is a bronze unit that rather brazenly features an animal with a very large set of antlers. Could this be late Iron Age proof? It’s hard to say. Certainly the Iron Age coin engraver was a talented fellow; well capable of portraying a known animal to a certain degree of accuracy. He was also quite capable of copying all kinds of classical designs; griffins and sphinxes abound. Unless he was trying to fit in the Herculean tale of the Ceryneian Hind it is more likely that the animal featured could be a flesh and blood beast. While coins may not provide definitive evidence of the Irish elk's survival into the late Iron Age it could point to a memory of its survival in the region up to a relatively recent to time.