On the Real Watership Down
Cowslip’s Warren
The Sandleford rabbits attempt to assimilate into the strange culture of a warren that hides an appalling secret.
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.
Chapter Thirteen—Hospitality.
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. 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’s here that things get really confusing. So confusing, that since this website was published I’ve revised my take on where Cowslip’s Warren was located. In hindsight, I think I was guilty of jumping to conclusions without paying careful enough attention to what Richard Adams had written. Nonetheless, I have decided to keep my original entry online should you wish to read it.
One thing that still stands between this revised page and the original is that the landscape around Cowslip’s Warren underwent noteworthy changes at some point in the mid-twentieth century, post-1945. Today, Google Maps overheads show that woodland has been depleted, field boundaries altered, and most importantly, a ‘brook’ or drainage ditch, has been diverted. Based upon a 1960s Ordnance Survey land utilisation map and a commercially available map from the early 1970s (see gallery, below) we can conclude the brook was diverted at a point between 1968 and 1972.
Cowslip’s Warren of the novel seems to be set in an environment closely resembling that of the 1940s, before the addition of new field boundaries would have complicated Cowslip’s initial meeting with the Sandleford rabbits. Nonetheless, 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 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.
Given Adams’s description of outward curving wood-edges, 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 begin making scratchings for shelter.
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 the area where Cole’s Copse and Frith Copse join. The warren entrance holes would have been just a short distance to the north, on the western edge of Frith Copse. Trees on the map show the thin strip of woodland that Cowslip passed through.
The site of Cowslip’s warren in July 2025, positioned in the treeline, just below 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.’
This hedge was the boundary that runs due south from the western tip of Cole’s Copse. It was subsequently replaced by a ditch which, in turn, was filled in. 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 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 I’ve studied, none of the rabbits would have needed to have passed through this hedge. Fiver was to the west of it, not the east. Nonetheless, it is by passing back through this hedge that Bigwig is snared.
Annotated view of the landscape (featuring the Flayrah area and hedge) from above Cole’s Copse. October 2025.
Escape Route:
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.
Gallery
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.
