(For more about these wonderful paintings, please click on them.)
High, lonely hills, where the wind and the sound carry and the ground's as dry as straw in a barn.
(Richard Adams, Watership Down)
(For more about these wonderful paintings, please click on them.)
This section of the site is a record of the trip I made to Watership Down (and a few other sites from the story) in the spring of 2004. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide to every part of the rabbits' various journeys; for that you should look to Chris Boyce's quite superb The Real Watership Down website, which has photographs from almost every major WD location, mostly taken in the early 1980s.
Of course, as he mentions himself, quite a bit has changed in the area in twenty years, and even more so since... well, whenever Watership Down is actually set, which must be 1967 at the latest for the film (since that was the last year steam trains ran to Overton, and that the BBC Home Service broadcast before becoming Radio 4), but could well be considerably earlier for the book, with all its talk of cart-tracks, Dr Adams (Richard's father) and the like. Even so, there is still much to enjoy in the area for the ardent WD fan.
As I don't have a car, doing everything in one day was quite impossible, and so I decided to concentrate on the area around Watership itself, leaving time later for a quick investigation around Sandleford. All photos are my own, which may explain their variable quality! I apologise if I've left your favourite view out, but I couldn't put everything in or I'd still be trudging up past Nuthanger Farm... all the text was written by me after the event, and that being so there are probably some glaring mistakes in there somewhere. Please point them out if you like - my email address can be found here.
Paintings copyright © Nicky "Eliki" Rowe 2004-5.
Text copyright © David "Loganberry" Buttery 2004-7. Updated 04/02/07.