LAST month, a set of magnificent red deer antlers were spotted on the beach at Borth by visitors, Julien Culham and Sharon Davies-Culham.

Rather than attempting to remove the skull from the beach, they reported it to the Royal Commission in Aberystwyth who in turn alerted Dr Martin Bates from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) who’s been doing research work in Borth for many years.

Since then, the story of the antlers has moved on apace, with initial investigation of the deposits in which the antlers were recovered. Dr Bates has had confirmation of the first radiocarbon date from the remains of the skull attached to the antlers.

The deer is now known to have lived and died somewhere between 1200 and 1000 BC - the middle part of the Bronze Age.

“This is a far more exciting date than we were expecting,” said Dr Bates of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

“I had thought that it would be in excess of 4000, or even 6000, years old but this is considerably younger than any of us anticipated. What this date tells us is that dryland persisted in this place at least until the Bronze Age, which means that the flooding here was therefore more recent than previously thought. The antlers have therefore totally changed our understanding of what happened to this landscape in the past”.

The sands and silts in which the antlers were found have also been subject to initial examination and it is now clear that the environment in which they were found was one of saltmarsh and tidal channels.

Dr John Whittaker of the Natural History Museum in London said: “The microfossils that are present in the sands only survive in saltmarsh conditions so I have no doubt that the remains of this beast came to rest in a small gully perhaps cutting through a grassy saltmarsh”.

However, one of the issues that still puzzles the team is how and why the deer died.

This was an animal in its prime so did he die through natural causes such as disease or a broken leg, or were other agencies at work?

“Human activity in the Bronze Age is well attested to in the surrounding area and human footprints in the peat, alongside burnt stone, indicate activity in the local vicinity,” continues Dr Bates.

“There are no tell-tale marks on the remains to suggest the animal had been hunted though, or even perished in a rutt, so it will probably continue to be a mystery,” he adds.

The remains have now become part of another UWTSD project, entitled Layers in the Landscape. This project is funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation and brings together science, humanities and the arts in response to thousands of years’ worth of flooding in Cardigan Bay with the antlers being a central part of this new story.

Erin Kavanagh, the project’s co-ordinator says: “We believe that this Imperial stag was alive in the middle of the time span we are examining, between the demise of the forest and the birth of the beach. How might we therefore imagine the changes he saw that are now lost to us – and what other wonders may there still be, held in secret by the sea…?”