Part of a golden age of (often landscape-infused) adventure tales published for younger readers, Richard Adams’ 1972 novel Watership Down defined many a 1970s childhood in Britain. But Martin Rosen’s subsequent film adaptation of it in 1978 arguably terrified the same generation as much as it thrilled it, with a notoriously dark, occasionally violent, saga realised through innovative animation. A blend of fantastical folklore, epic adventure and sombre parable, Rosen’s film is still to this day one of Britain’s most celebrated animatedfeatures.
Watership Down follows a rebellious group of rabbits living in a warren in Sandleford. Hazel (voiced by John Hurt) is troubled by his brother Fiver’s (Richard Briers) visions of apocalypse for the warren. But when they tell the warren’s leader (Ralph Richardson), they are disbelieved and orders are given for no rabbit to leave. The pair escapes just in time, along with a handful of other rabbits, to avoid a huge housing development destroying their home. The small group then set out in search of a new warren, following Fiver’s visions of an idyll on ahillside.
Though undoubtedly a brutal film at times, Rosen’s film is also very beautiful, thanks in part to its visual renditions of real landscapes. Staying true to the locations that inspired Adams’s original book, the animation team looked to many actual places and recreated them as highly effective watercolour backdrops. So although Watership Down is an animated film, the accuracy of their work means that many of the scenes shown in the film can be visited in reallife.
Here are five real locations that inspired both the book and the film of WatershipDown.
Thechurch
As the rabbits progress on their journey, they come across a number of places whose details are based on real surviving features of the Hampshire landscape. One of the first man-made areas seen in the film is a graveyard and achurch.
The rabbits run through the graveyard and hide in an outhouse. This is the graveyard of the St Mary the Virgin and St John the Baptist Church in Newtown. The angle of the shots can be ascertained in relation to the church itself, which is recreated in effectivedetail.
A clearer shot of the church appears just as the rabbits find some shelter, before they are attacked by rats. The alignment of the gravestones was, however, rendered with some creativelicense.
Thefarm
Another prominent building based on a real place is the farmhouse where the rabbits find the caged does, as well as the film’s dangerous dog and cat (voiced by Lynn Farleigh). The farm is Nuthanger Farm in Sydmonton. The farm is on a public footpath, from which you can just about spot the buildings seen in thefilm.
Thearch
Another distinctive man-made feature seen in the film is the brick arch of a raised railway line. This arch is real, with the railway lines carrying trains to the nearby town of Whitchurch. However, with the light fading on my visit, it became clear that the arch I’d researched was not the right one; the likely real one being further along the line and difficult to access. A photo here is included as an approximation of the actual one down theline.
Appropriately, the train lines head past the small village of Freefolk where the local pub is also named in honour of Watership Down. More importantly, Whitchurch is where Adams himself is buried, his grave naturally adorned by a stonerabbit.
Thepylon
One of the first signs that the rabbits are near Watership Down is a pylon, which is seen both in the distance and upclose.
The pylon likely used as inspiration stands in a field between Sydmonton and Watership Down. In real life, the pylon more often visited by Watership Down fans is situated nearer the middle of a field, while another stands closer to the hill. They were possibly amalgamated for the animation so that shots could include both sweeping vistas of the fields and proximity to the hillside. For this visit, I chose the pylon closer to the hill, partly because the adjacent down plays a more prominent role in the visuals of the film, but also because the other pylon was in the middle of a farmer’s field with a young cropsprouting.
This shot shows the pylon as seen from below. The woozy effect from looking up through its structure is very much like it is in thefilm.
WatershipDown
The hill of Watership Down is the most important feature of the film’s landscape. We first see it with a view of the pylons, probably taken from the hillside ofSydmonton.
The adjacent field meets the steep incline of the down and is a regular feature of the film. This shot shows the wild undergrowth now separating the downland from the farmer’sfield.
Watership Down itself was once a popular viewing spot due to the vast vistas out over the landscape. However, today virtually the whole of its top part has been given over to a private training ground for horse racing, meaning the view the rabbits enjoy can only really be seen if you wander briefly off a tiny path cutting through the race-course. This is not advised, however, as it is private land, and I took this shot before I realised my mistake. The rest of the landscape seen in the film has been turned into a manufactured vista with neatly trimmed grass, hurdles and sandytracks.
On top of the down are a handful of trees that have survived the changes to the landscape. One in particular stands out in the film. In memory of Adams, a hazel tree has been planted in some farmland further down the hill, its base adorned with mementos and dedications. It looks slightly similar in shape to the tree we see in the film’s final shot, albeitsmaller.
Finally, again some way into private land, there’s another de facto monument to Adams’s memory. This stone trigpoint, again decorated with Adams-related mementos, lies in another farmer’s field atop of Watership Down, though access is limited. For a story and film about the pain of land-grabbing, it seems deeply ironic that the landscape at the heart of the story seems to have met a parallelfate.
References
Watership Down is out now on BFI 4K UHD and Blu-ray.
