Cowslip’s Warren

In Chapter Twelve, The Stranger In The Field, the Sandleford rabbits leave the heather and unwelcoming woodland of Newtown Common behind them, breaking into beautiful open meadows and long grass. Keen to remain in such a beautiful location, the rabbits begin to scrape shallow holes close to an oak tree between two copses. These two pieces of woodland are divided by a brook. With rain imminent, the light-hearted digging is interrupted by a large, well kept rabbit sat in front of the opposite area of woodland. He introduces himself as Cowslip, and invites the hlessil to stay in his warren’s numerous ’empty burrows’. The travellers are non-committal and Cowslip heads back to his warren, the offer still open.

As the rain begins to pour, the rabbits are beautifully described by Richard Adams as ‘a muddy handful of scratchers, crouching in a narrow, draughty pit in lonely country. They were not out of the weather. They were waiting, uncomfortably, for the weather to change.’ They need no persuasion to accept Cowslip’s proposal. Only Fiver protests, as if he senses something is badly wrong, not that he is entirely certain of the source of his fears.

The subsequent five chapters reveal the chillingly eerie denialism of the warren’s inhabitants in the face of an unspoken secret they all share and accept. It is only when Bigwig is almost killed in a snare (Chapter Seventeen, The Shining Wire) that things become clearer and the Sandleford rabbits flee.

The film’s coverage of this sequence is condensed, but the essential truths remain. And who can forget the infamous scene in which Bigwig chokes blood in the snare as flies swarm around his suffocating body?

Bigwig wishes he had listened to Fiver’s protests … each and every one.

It’s a tough scene to watch, and almost as difficult as trying to uncover the real location in which the Warren of the Snares, or Cowslip’s Warren—call it what you will—was situated. We know that the rabbits’ travels took them roughly south-south-west from Newtown Church and through the dense, alien undergrowth of Newtown Common. The open meadowland which they subsequently find themselves in is to the east of the pretty village of Burghclere and south of the hamlet of Adbury and its country estate.

It is here where everything I once thought I knew about this section of the novel becomes mired down in a bog of uncertainty. There is, you see, a stunning lack of agreement as to where Cowslip’s Warren is. As such, I do not claim my interpretation of its location is beyond question. Contact me with your own thoughts, using the form near the bottom of the front page.

The Big Issue

If we accept Pauline Baynes’ map from the 1970s Puffin edition of the book to be canon (any successive illustrators including Marilyn Hemmett and Joe Sutphin have travelled this path), then the warren is adjacent to a piece of woodland called High Wood. The location of the dividing brook—at least as it was before landscaping work altered its path between the mid-1960s and 1972—means the Sandleford rabbits would have been making scrapes alongside the western edge of Frith Copse. Given that the likes of Baynes were officially commissioned to provide their maps, you would think they would know better than anyone other than Richard Adams. So, what’s the problem?

Well, knowing how the rabbits came to be here, they would have needed to have crossed the brook to reach Frith Copse, or made a loop south of where it rises. If this occurred then I find it peculiar that Adams forgot to mention it. Indeed, rather than making this exploratory detour before Cowslip is first spotted, Hazel tells his companions ‘Let’s go back a little way’, thereby retracing rather than extending their steps. In other words, High Wood cannot be the site of Cowslip’s Warren.

Chris Boyce in his now archived website agrees that Frith Copse is a more likely site for Cowslip’s Warren. So too does Aldo Galli, who became friends with Richard Adams and provided some truly exceptional paintings for the Oneworld illustrated edition of the novel. 

Let’s explore some more. I will be making references to geographical features from the 1888-1915 Ordnance Survey map given its glut of toponyms. Its 1945 companion is less detailed, though the  landscape features are near identical.

The 1888-1915 Ordnance Survey map of the landscape around Cowslip’s Warren.

The Sandleford Rabbits’ Scrapes

In Chapter Twelve, the rabbits split into two scouting teams to explore the area:

Hazel led the other rabbits across the field and up to the edge of the woodland. They went slowly along the foot of the bank, pushing in and out of the clumps of red campion and ragged robin. From time to time one or another would begin to scrape in the gravelly bank, or venture a little way in among the trees and nut-bushes to scuffle in the leaf-mould. After they had been searching and moving on quietly for some time, they reached a place from which they could see that the field below them broadened out. Both on their own side and opposite, the wood-edges curved outwards, away from the brook. They also noticed the roofs of a farm, but some distance off. Hazel stopped and they gathered round him.

The brook in question is the thick line that goes north from the north-eastern finger of Batt’s Copse, just north of Palmer’s Court Farm. From here it flows between Dovey’s Copse and Cole’s Copse, then passes up between High Wood and Frith Copse.

Aldo Galli suggests it is alongside High Wood where the Sandleford rabbits make their scratchings:

Small woods and fields in the outskirts of Burghclere, the site of Cowslip’s warren includes Frith Copse and the opposite wood, High Wood, where our rabbits started to make some scrapes…

At first glance, this is a reasonable conclusion and one I’ve also held. However, I have developed significant doubts based solely upon Richard Adams’ words. In Chapter Thirteen he writes:

The corner of the opposite wood turned out to be an acute point. Beyond it, the ditch and trees curved back again in a re-entrant, so that the field formed a bay with a bank running all the way round.

Now, if the Sandleford rabbits are making scrapes alongside High Wood, then the ‘opposite wood’ is Frith Copse. Nowhere are the trees curving in to make a re-entrant. Had Adams written ‘The opposite corner of the wood turned out to be an acute point. Beyond it…’ then this would have supported the case for High Wood.

Instead, given Adams’s description of outward curving wood-edges, I suspect Hazel will have been located along or just beyond the north-eastern edge of Dovey’s Copse, looking over the brook towards the northern boundary of Cole’s Copse. It is here, close to an oak tree alongside Dovey’s Copse, where the rabbits likely begin making scratchings for shelter. From this location it is certainly possible to interpret the south-eastern corner of High Wood as acute. Keep this in mind as I now try to pinpoint Cowslip’s Warren.

Annotated view, from the west, of the area around Cowslip’s Warren.

Cowslip’s Warren

It is at the beginning of Chapter Thirteen where the Sandleford rabbits make their way over to Cowslip’s Warren:

The corner of the opposite wood turned out to be an acute point. Beyond it, the ditch and trees curved back again in a re-entrant, so that the field formed a bay with a bank running all the way round. It was evident now why Cowslip, when he left them, had gone among the trees. He had simply run in a direct line from their holes to his own, passing on his way through the narrow strip of woodland that lay between. Indeed, as Hazel turned the point and stopped to look about him, he could see the place where Cowslip must have come out. A clear rabbit-track led from the bracken, under the fence and into the field. In the bank on the further side of the bay the rabbit-holes were plain to see, showing dark and distinct in the bare ground. It was as conspicuous a warren as could well be imagined.

From studying the map, the re-entrant is that ‘bay’ formed where High Wood and Frith Copse create a narrow corridor through which the brook runs. The warren entrance holes would have been here, on the western edge of Frith Copse. Trees on an overhead photograph from the mid-1940s show the thin strip of woodland that Cowslip passed through. 

The site of Cowslip’s warren in July 2025, positioned in the treeline, above the solitary tree that is to the right of centre. Dovey’s Copse is left, out of shot.

The Flayrah Field

One of the most chilling aspects of the chapters set around Cowslip’s Warren is how humans leave good quality food, flayrah, in one of the fields. In Chapter Fourteen, ‘Like Trees in November’, an unnamed warren rabbit tells Hazel:

‘The flayrah’s left in the field, usually near the place where the brook rises. We either eat it there or bring it back – or both. But we’ll have to bring some back today. The rain was so bad last night that no one went out and we ate almost everything in the warren.’

 The brook rises in the field south-west of Cole’s Copse, best seen (bottom left) in the 1942 Ordnance Survey map of the area:

The 1942 Ordnance Survey map showing the area where Cowslip’s Warren was located.

The Snare:

The infamous snaring of Bigwig occurs during Chapter Seventeen after he and Hazel locate an absent Fiver, who is planning to leave Cowslip’s Warren. Fiver is found beyond ‘the hedge beside the carrot-ground and the source of the brook.’

An overhead image from the 1940s shows us this hedge was the boundary that runs due south from the western tip of Cole’s Copse. By 1972 this was accompanied (or replaced) by a ditch which, in turn, was filled in. Today it is possible to see the ground markings of the ditch from above in dry, late summer weather. 

Interestingly, the placement of the hedge this may potentially leave us with a small geographical error on Adams’s behalf. Bigwig notes that Fiver had passed ‘From the [warren’s entrance] hole straight down towards the brook.’ Both Bigwig and Hazel follow Fiver’s track in the wet grass and subsequently ‘come through the hedge.’ Unless Adams spoke of a hedgerow that was not apparent in the two Ordnance Survey maps and aerial image I’ve studied, none of the rabbits would have needed to pass through this boundary. Fiver was to the west of it, not the east. Nonetheless, it is by passing back through this hedge that Bigwig is snared.

Perhaps Richard Adams was actually referring to the tree-line, marked on more detailed maps, which ran northwards, just to the west of of the hedge. All of the rabbits would have needed to pass through this tree-line to reach the flayrah pile and it is not beyond reason that it may have been accompanied by a thin strip of foliage.

Annotated view of the landscape (featuring the Flayrah area and hedge) from above Cole’s Copse. October 2025.

Escape Route:

Here’s something that’s not in doubt. Following Bigwig’s brush with death in Chapter Seventeen, Fiver persuades the Sandleford rabbits to leave for higher ground. Adams describes the route they took:

South of them, the ground rose gently away from the brook. Along the crest was the line of a cart-track and beyond, a copse. Hazel turned towards it and the rest began to follow him up the slope in ones and twos.

The cart-track in question is now a public footpath, running from Clere School in neighbouring Burghclere, through the old farm that is now called Palmer’s Hill Court, and on to Cow House Lane. The woodland the rabbits subsequently pass through whilst headed south is called Badmore Copse.

Rabbit’s eye view south from the ‘cart track’. Just right of centre, the gap in the trees is filled by the distant escarpment of Watership Down.

Sunset over the track, approximately where the departing rabbits would have crossed from right to left. October 2025.

From Dovey’s Copse over to Cole’s Copse and Frith Wood. October 2025.

1972 map showing the diversion of the brook. Note the bay is still visible.

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