Richard Adams · 1972 · overland

Richard Adams's 1972 novel, and the introductory note says every location in it is a real place. A band of rabbits leaves Sandleford Park near Newbury when Fiver foresees its destruction, crosses the Enborne into Hampshire, and settles on a real hill sixteen kilometres south - then has to raid a warren run as a police state to find does enough to survive.

1. 1
   Sandleford Warren

   Sandleford Park south of Newbury, and a dry slope dotted with rabbits. Fiver senses something coming, the Chief Rabbit will not listen, and Hazel takes eleven others out at dusk - a real place, and still undeveloped.

2. 2
   The Enborne

   The river that divides Berkshire from Hampshire, crossed on a makeshift raft with Fiver and the wounded Pipkin aboard - and past it the country the rest of the book happens in.

3. 3
   Newtown Common

   East across the old A34 and through Newtown churchyard, then south to the common, where Hazel's leadership is settled - and where Cowslip's warren of snares and fatalism nearly ends the whole journey.

4. 4
   Watership Down

   Sixteen kilometres from home, the high lonely ridge in north Hampshire where they dig in - a real hill on the Wayfarer's Walk, with a beech planted on it now in Richard Adams's memory.

5. 5
   Nuthanger Farm

   A real farm below the down, raided to free the hutch rabbits Clover and Haystack - and where Hazel is shot and left for dead in a drainpipe, which the reader is allowed to believe for several chapters.

6. 6
   Efrafa

   South past Caesar's Belt and the iron road to the great overcrowded warren run as a police state by General Woundwort - and Bigwig going in alone as a spy, on a plan that depends on a boat and a thunderstorm.

7. 7
   The Test

   The does taken off in a punt down the river past Freefolk and Whitchurch, in the escape the whole middle of the book has been building to - and the footbridges over the Test are precisely as the rabbits found them.

8. 8
   Watership Down

   Home, and Woundwort's army comes after them - and Hazel's answer is a farm dog and a hole in the ground, and a very old rabbit at the end being invited to come away by someone with silver-grey fur.