Watership Down

A rag-tag band sets out across an alien, hostile landscape, pursued by enemies, their lives threatened at every moment. This could be Allied soldiers behind enemy lines, or hobbits in Middle-Earth. But it’s not – these are bunnies. In order to avoid certain death they must hop across an immense wasteland of English countryside – seven miles – to the remote shelter of a low chalk hill. This epic journey sweeps across 475 pages of Richard Adams’s 1972 novel, Watership Down.

Adams’s fable for adults is about a lot of things, and one of them is the English countryside. This is no fictional landscape, idealized and manipulated. Every place in the book is real; Watership Down is a real hill, Nuthanger Farm is a real farm, the footbridges over the River Test are precisely as the rabbits found them. You can visit these places. In fact, it’s a good idea; the rabbits’ journey deep into the English countryside reveals some beautiful things.

But first, a word of explanation. Adams brings us into a very special landscape from a very special perspective – about six inches off the ground. At this level, you have to stretch up high on your legs to see over the grass. You don’t walk through the grass; you hop, your eyes bouncing from dirt level to grasstop and back down. This makes it very difficult to hold a straight line, so you have to stop every once in a while to see where you are. And while you can’t see much, there are plenty of animals who can see you, particularly when you stand up to look around. Most of them will kill you when they see you; your enemies are The Thousand. Crossing a field becomes an exhausting trek requiring great skill and courage. On the other hand, you won’t have to find a gate; hedgerows are a welcome refuge, not a barrier.

Time, as well as space, is different. Rabbits only live for two or three years. They experience life as an ever-changing sequence that, remarkably, cycles back as the seasons come around. The backdrop to their lives, the English landscape, remains constant and unchanging through a single generation, or even two or three. Constant but by no means natural; humans have profoundly altered every square inch of England, and the rabbits must fit themselves into these utterly human landscapes. The rabbits like landscapes that are mature, with many species and a wide variety of places to hide, as well as a scarcity of people (prominent among The Thousand). Raw, new landscapes, with people nearby, are deeply hostile.

When we visit these same landscapes we see things very differently. In our decades of experience, the seasons flash past and landscapes shift before our eyes. Taxes alter, and meadows are plowed up for newly profitable crops. Roads improve, and rich people build weekend estates. The human population becomes larger and wealthier, and deserted ridges become popular picnic sites. In the years since civil servant Richard Adams walked these hills in the 1950s, and chief rabbit Hazel-Rah led his comrades up Watership Down, twenty generations of rabbits have grown and died. Their descendants probably have not noticed this half-century of change; but you will.

The Meadows

Visiting is easy enough and worth the while of anyone who loves beautiful countryside. An old lane, long closed to vehicles but open to walkers, starts across from the former manor, Sandleford Priory (now a boys’ school), and heads east into what was once the manor’s park – now farmland and the site of the bunnies’ original home, Sandleford Warren. Park without blocking the gate, cross the stile, and enjoy the walk through fields and forests seldom seen by outsiders. The land rolls down to the River Enbourne, a strip of trees on your left; and up across fields on your right, to rich, deep forests that hide Newbury and smother its noise. Great fields of broad beans, covered in their lovely little flowers, line much of the path, yielding their heavy sweet smell in the spring. When the lane crosses a rivulet, you are there. The warren was up the hill, behind you and to your right.

Should you (illegally) stray from the footpath uphill to where the warren set beneath the fine old copse, you won’t find any rabbits. It’s a hunt club now. Shotgun shells litter the ground, and blinds perch in the great oak trees, like tree houses for grownups. The rabbits are long gone.

The Commons

And, most marvelously, it’s still there, and still a common. That is, Newton Common is still in common ownership of the villagers of Newtown, who possess certain rights to use its resources but can’t fence or farm it. In medieval times they would cut firewood and peat, coppice trees for pollards (that is, cut large trees for the poles that would grow from their stumps), graze their goats and sheep in the summer, and “mast” their pigs in the winter, letting them survive semi-wild off the autumn nut and acorn crop.

From our towering viewpoint, easily looking over the inedible heather, it’s a wonderful place. Newtown Common is lush with vegetation of all sorts and flush with wildlife. Beech, oak, pine, and birch fight for footholds in the poor soil; underneath, the trees open into large expanses of heather, gorse, and tough bog grass. Brilliant yellow gorse flowers succeed to the delicate lavender of heather blooms. A maze of paths cross over hard white stones and deep black peat; walk softly, and watch for a startled grouse or red deer.

The River Test

“On almost any other river, Blackberry’s plan would not have worked,” Adams tells us. But the Test is a special river. First, it’s a chalk river, spring-fed from the water seeping from underneath Watership Down. Its flow is constant and fast, its waters are crystalline, and its bed made of sand, gravel, and bits of flint. Second, the Test is renown as one of England’s premiere trout fisheries. As such, it is groomed as carefully as any cottage garden, its center kept free of obstructions, its flow carefully managed. When you look at the Test from any of its many bridges you see straight through the fast, clear water to the few strands of water weeds waving downstream from the gravel.

The rabbits’ hide-out is now strictly off-limits inside a private estate, Laverstoke Park. However, you can see virtually identical scenery a few hundred yards downstream, at Freefolk. Here a short lane crosses the Test on a brick arched bridge, to dead-end in a hundred yards at the village church. This is a good place to walk up and down the bank (fishing is strictly forbidden, reserved by the river’s owners), enjoying the riot of wildflowers, the clear, cold water, the water weeds bending in the fast current. The brick bridge is almost exactly like the one upon which the rabbits come a cropper – three arches, each with a scant foot’s clearance at the high point. Downstream is an old concrete weir, still in use to regulate flow. Further downstream, public footpaths cross the Test, swing away from it and back towards it, then recross it; but there is always a fisherman’s path along one bank or the other.

Watership Down

The rabbits built their new warren just over the shoulder of Watership Down, at the northern edge of a beech hanger named Cannon Avenue. A hanger, in this context, is an open wood at the top of a hill, such that its branches overhang the hill's edge. Today there is a gallop — a long track for training and exercising horses — between the down's edge and the beech hanger, but whether or not this existed in 1958, when the book takes place, is unclear. Today's gallop has been bulldozed level and rolled flat, and any trace of a burrowing animal has extirpated. It would be very bad to be a bunny near a gallop. As it is, the Watership warren, the Honeycomb, is only a hundred yards from the gallop. Perhaps the gallop has been extended since the period when the book takes place. It certainly existed in some form, as it is mentioned in passing.

The Hampshire County Council has included the crest of Watership Down into their long distance footpath, The Wayfarer’s Walk. This path traces the steps of drovers, men who drove livestock to markets over very long distances, from medieval times through the early 19^th Century. Like rabbits, drovers hated mud and settlements and searched out loose, dry soil with tall grass. Throughout the drovers’ long history Watership Down was covered in grass for miles in both directions, just the sort of place drovers liked. Take the Wayfarer’s Walk westward for a mile and you’ll come to a Celtic hillfort (a pre-Roman bank-and-ditch fortification) named Ladle Hill, about seven acres in size and never completed. Dating from sometime during the First Millennium B.C., it predates Britain’s rabbits by as much as a thousand years – as the Romans introduced rabbits to Britain around 50 A.D.

Enjoy the view, which is spectacular. Then retrace your steps to the west end of the gallop, where a large lump marks the remains of a Bronze Age tomb. The lane that extends southward is the one followed by the bunnies in their raid on Efrafa, its hedges replanted. A quarter-mile down this path on your right is a small surviving meadow of downland grass, alive with wildflowers in the spring, crossed by a public path that leads back to the lane. Walk quietly; look closely; here, and in the hedges that survive across the lane. The rabbits remain, as they always will.