Watership Down

Watership Down: what an extraordinary book, with such an intricate and intriguing plot!

I love the novel and Richard Adams’ characters. And I love the values they share: loyalty, friendship, comradeship, sacrifice and heroism, the ideal of freedom and justice, the fight against what’s evil….

After I bought a copy of the book, I could not put it down, and I read it over and over again because the more I did, the more I appreciated the story and the details that enhanced it.

At some point, I realised that the map in the book depicted real places. Perhaps, I could walk in the rabbits’ steps, I thought

It all started as a little adventure, and before long, I found myself out in the wild with a band of rabbits! Watership Down became real: there were woods and a river to cross, followed by a dangerous road, a church yard, and thick heather. There was indeed a copse with snares, there were brooks to splash through, and a small lake to skirt, before finally reaching Watership Down and the beech hanger! There was a farm like in a fairy tale, and then another journey again, on towards Caesar’s Belt, Efrafa, the iron road, and the fast river beyond….

Walking the Downs with Hazel and Bigwig, brought back a child’s desire to discover and watch the wonders of nature: the silent, powerful sunrise on Watership Down and the grass shining with dew, or the sky reddening to the west on a peaceful summer evening; the wild flowers and the little creatures that populate the meadows and the woods; the many species of birds and the Thousand. And of course, the rabbits themselves, whom I spied on and took so many photos of.

I had to put on canvas my whole experience, as a tribute to Richard Adams and his Watership Down, and at the same time, as a tribute to the beautiful Berkshire Downs.

In my paintings, fiction meets reality, and I hope you will enjoy them. I hope they will help you in your own journey through the story and the Watership Down world.

The book that has inspired me so much was first published in 1972 and has become a true classic. It has never been out of print and has run through many editions worldwide, now including the illustrated editions with these paintings.

Believe it or not, there is a warren along the bank on the left of the very beech tree of the story (destroyed in a storm, only the stump remains, though a nearby beech grew as well as it did. Sadly, a few years after I painted it in “The Last Primroses”, this tree too came down in a storm). And there is a warren on the evening side of the beech hanger, along the hedges that border the field: here is a photo of some rabbits at evening silflay (with the beech hanger in the background) and a photo of the rabbit that inspired my version of Bigwig.

A photo of the sunset on this peaceful evening on the Down also inspired my painting “The Whole World”.