On the Real Watership Down
The Road Crossing
Leaving the beanfield behind them, the Sandleford rabbits come to the old A34.
They ran on and crept through the hedge. Hazel looked down at the road in astonishment. For a moment he thought that he was looking at another river – black, smooth and straight between its banks. Then he saw the gravel embedded in the tar and watched a spider running over the surface.
‘But that’s not natural,’ he said, sniffing the strange, strong smells of tar and oil. ‘What is it? How did it come there?’
‘It’s a man-thing,’ said Bigwig. ‘They put that stuff there and then the hrududil run on it – faster than we can; and what else can run faster than we?’
‘It’s dangerous then? They can catch us?’
‘No, that’s what’s so odd. They don’t take any notice of us at all. I’ll show you, if you like.’
Chapter Ten—The Road and the Common.
The road crossing point is somewhere between my position and the telegraph pole.
Leaving the beanfield, the rabbits pass into an adjacent grazing pasture. Here, Hazel notices a fast moving car on the road behind a hedge.
At the roadside verge, the rabbits discover a dead yona (hedgehog) on the road. Bigwig enlightens his fellow travellers as to the dangers cars pose to rabbits, particularly at night (Chapter Ten, The Road and the Common). In the film, this scene is played to comic effect as Bigwig larks around, playing a game of ‘chicken’ with a passing Land Rover and an open-top sports car.
The stretch of road presented by Adams was, in real life, once a reasonably quiet part of A34 Winchester to Preston trunk road south of Newbury. Things began to slowly change in 1971 with the opening of the M4 motorway to the north of the town. I’ve ingrained memories of coach journeys through Newbury during the 1990s, heading southbound at an agonising crawl to various football grounds in Hampshire.
These days, the A34 has been re-routed to the west of Newbury as a hectic dual-carriageway bypassing the town. The crossing point is now part of the redesignated B4640, one of two roads linking the south of Newbury to the A34.
