WHAT beautiful pictures of the deer at Brookwood Cemetery were shown on television last Sunday in Sir David Attenborough’s Wild Isles. 

Reader Jenny Mukerji, who is a stalwart of both the Brookwood Cemetery Society and the Woking History Society, told me of some research she had undertaken some years ago.

“During the English Civil Wars of the 17th century, soldiers on both sides had to forage for food and deer were taken,” she said.

“When the monarchy was restored in 1660, the shortage of deer led to a petition, in 1664, for them to be restocked in the Brookwood area. Whether or not these are the ancestors of our current deer, I am not sure.”

I do hope it is true: I love a bit of folklore, especially if it’s local.

I recently mentioned the walks around Brookwood Cemetery that are organised by the Brookwood Cemetery Society (www.tbcs.org.uk). 

We joined the tour around the North Side. It does make you realise how enormous the cemetery is, some 220 acres. The military section has headstones in neat rows and it brings home something of the horrors of war when one considers that these represent just some of the dead.

Much of the rest of the North Side is informal, with graves of different shapes and sizes from simple headstones to magnificent mausoleums. It is still a working cemetery.

Still, Brookwood Cemetery is used to appearing in films and on television, such as in the Sandman series, The Crown, The Omen, Dark Sanctuary and the Icarus episode of Endeavour. 

Last year, we were lucky enough to visit the Colquhoun Chapel, which had been recently restored, and learned how it had been used for Icarus. I believe the film company had to do some remedial work before it passed muster by the health and safety brigade.

It is well worth a visit, for the first time we saw it, years ago, it could only be partially glimpsed through such thick brush and undergrowth that one could quite imagine sleeping beauty still lying inside.

A cemetery is defined as a burial ground, a graveyard for the dead – but with film companies around it is a place of “Action!”, if only for someone with a clapperboard.