Jægersborg Dyrehave

This guide to Jaegersborg Dyrehave opens with King Christian V of Denmark raising his hunting sword to finish off an exhausted stag in these woods in the autumn of 1698, and missing his strike. It then goes back to his father, who fenced off this beech wood in 1669 to keep the royal household supplied with venison, and to a teenage Christian watching Louis XIV's huntsmen stage a parforce hunt at Versailles, a spectacle he came home determined to recreate. You'll hear how he tore down his father's modest fence and cut the park's straight roads through the trees to funnel a fleeing stag toward a single clearing. Look for the old oaks that were already standing on the day of that missed strike.