Sandleford Park: the Woods
The place where the rabbits entered the woods is, today, part of a strip of trees either side of the brook and pool. This watercourse continues on into the main belt of woodland, but before then it comes extremely close to the edge of the strip. The trees here seemed unlikely to give the fleeing rabbits any significant cover.
The pool.
The walk from the Sandleford Warren site to the site of the River Enborne crossing is one of my favourites across the entire Watership Down landscape. It was a route I followed again in late February 2026.
It was a largely uneventful stroll but reminded me of a niggling detail that had previously come to light last summer: it is slightly challenging to reconcile Richard Adams’ description of where the rabbits enter the woods in relation to the current geographical reality.
The strip of trees next to the pool’s overflow. Where I’m stood was once woodland too.
In Chapter Five, In the Woods, Adams makes reference to the scene.
From the moment [Hazel] entered it the wood seemed full of noises. There was a smell of damp leaves and moss, and everywhere the splash of water went whispering about. Just inside, the brook made a little fall into a pool and the sound, enclosed among the trees, echoed as though in a cave.
The place where the rabbits entered the woods is, today, part of a strip of trees either side of the brook and pool. This watercourse continues on into the main belt of woodland, but before then it comes extremely close to the edge of the strip. The trees here seemed unlikely to give the fleeing rabbits any significant cover.
The overflow from the pool that leads through the woodland and down to the Enborne. It was dry when I previously visited in August 2025.
Such nerdy minutiae bothers me and I wondered if contemporary visitors to Sandleford Park are seeing the whole picture of the woodland Richard Adams described. So, as ever, I turned to the maps.
The field to the west of the narrow strip of trees shows on contemporary mapping (as well as aerial images from as far back as 1985) as having been agricultural land used to grow crops. However, a land use survey map from 1968 tells a very different story: much of this field was part of the main woodlands. The rabbits had, in fact, entered the woods just beyond the old byway that runs from west to east across the Park. In other words, much of the woodland of the novel, beyond that closest to the Enborne, has sadly been destroyed at some point between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s.