Watership Down by Arnie Wilson
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June was moving towards July and high summer. Hedgerows and verges were at their rankest and thickest. The rabbits sheltered in dim green, sun-flecked caves of grass, flowering marjoram and cow-parsley: peered round spotty hairy-stemmed clumps of viper’s bugloss, blooming red and blue above their heads: pushed between towering stalks of yellow mullein.
The summer of 1998 was not up to the one described by Richard Adams in Watership Down. But, it was not all bad, as we found when we spent an idyllic week looking after a friends’ Golden Labrador, Dylan Thomas Hardy in the middle of Hampshire’s Watership Down country, not far from the Berkshire border.
Surrounded by steep chalk ridges, rolling fields almost the size of prairies, dotted with the now ubiquitous, heady oilseed rape, mustard (not quite such a vibrant yellow), the less familiar fields of linseed, pinpricked with a galaxy of small blue flowers, and a bewildering network of tiny country lanes, it was difficult to believe we were only a few miles from the M3 and even closer to the A34.
As they sped through the countryside, few motorists would have had much of a clue about this glorious other country where things move much more slowly - if at all. Yet, this other England was almost under their noses. Some things did move quickly, however: the hares. There were many. The rabbits seemed, to my inexpert eye ate least, to have given way to them. Superficially at least, there was little sign of lapine life.
As we trudged and Dylan padded and panted the opening mile or two of our trek to Watership Down from Upper Woodcott, a tiny hamlet near the picturesque village of St Mary Bourne, just a few miles from Whitchurch and not 14 miles from Newbury, two soaring Buzzards mewed in stereo and a skylark took off only yards away for a spot of aerial busking.
The rabbits grazed or lay basking in the sun. A lark went twittering up into the brighter sunshine above, soared and sang and came slowly down, ending with a sideways, spread-wing glide and a wagtail’s run through the grass.
We duly applauded his brief concert, and young Dylan, just enjoying his first adult summer, rushed excitedly hither and thither, even chasing the odd hare. Fruitlessly, of course.
In the thick green grass he looked almost as though he was skiing in powder, slithering through the greenery and sometimes all but disappearing.
Before too long, having negotiated a long, exposed ridge and then continued beneath vaulted ceilings of beech, we reached the A 34 - a final reminder that were about to leave the soon-to-be 21st century behind as we pressed on along the Wayfarers’ Walk to Watership Down, still two hours away.
Dylan, already muddy-faced from an encounter with a pool of silage, sniffs the plaque and hurries on, making a brief foray into the outer reaches of a field of ripening corn. His tail - seemingly disembodied from his body - trails behind him like a submarine conning tower. The corn acts like a canine car wash. When he emerges a few yards later his face is clean again, as though he has shaved off a dirty beard.
Soon we have left the A 34 behind us, a distant roar of traffic, while we start to climb a valley dotted with wild flowers of almost every description. Here at last is a rabbit warren. But where are the occupants? It is like a rabbit ghost town.
Before long we have reached a vast plateau - the top of a huge escarpment. We are surrounded by forest and huge fields of linseed, rape and mustard. Like the yellowbrick road, the Wayfarers Walk seems to continue for ever. From our high hill-top, we gaze out across the valley floor. Apart from one village, Sydmonton, way below us, it is glorious, pure, uninterrupted countryside. We make a silent prayer that John Prescott never gets his hands on this part of the world for any housing projects.
As we leave the land of blue for the kingdom of yellow, Fred Sawyer, a local shepherd, arrives in his van. Three or four sheepdogs leap out and sniff the breeze. Fred, who answers more to “Shep” than Fred, is the only other human being we meet during our round trip of five and a half hours. He kindly tells us which way we should be heading for Watership Down, and even suggests an alternative way back.
We wonder if he knows a pub that might take Canadian dollars. In our rush to take advantage of some rare sunshine, we have left the house without any money. The prospect of a six hour walk without refreshment is an unhappy one, but then we discover two Canadian $10 bills in a rucksack I had last used in the Canadian Rockies. “There is a friendly pub down there in the village” says Shep. “They probably won’t take your dollars, but they might give you some credit if you explain the situation.”
“Now you will close the gates, won’t you?” he adds, plaintively. “I had a woman walking her dog out here the other day who refused to shut any of the gates. She said to me: ‘I ain’t shutting any of your festering gates. You’re dogs are out here running wild, so why shouldn’t mine?’ And I said, ‘Look miss, my dogs are trained sheep dogs,’ and left her to it. Some people. You just wouldn’t credit it, would you?”
We never did put the pub to the test because we failed to find it. Villages, let alone pubs, don’t grow on trees in this part of the world: we simply took the wrong route and missed it by miles.
By the time we had returned to Upper Woodcott, past Ladle Hill and Hare Warren Down, back across the alien A34, on past Seven Barrows, even Dylan was padding as slowly as we. Of rabbits there was till no sign. There was an autumnal feeling in the air.
The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree......In July, the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west, and once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose-hips that covered the briar.