Friday, April 21, 2006

A Pictorial Guide to "Watership Down"

The next time you decide to join Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and the other rabbits on their perilous journey to Watership Down, you might want to have a few authentic visuals to stimulate your imagination. This site has a bunch of personal photographs of various scenes in the wonderful Richard Adams novel, taken by a devoted fan of the book, Chris Boyce.

Of course, you don't have to have these pictures to be thrilled by the adventure but I thought it nice to know that the places were real. Indeed, Adams' story was first inspired by the serene beauty of the countryside. The dedication of the novel was "To Juliet and Rosamund, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon". It seems that Adams began the unusual tale as a meandering story told to his two daughters (Juliet who was 1o years old at the time and Rosamund who was 8) as they drove the nearby road. The girls loved the story and kept after their dad to organize it a little more and write it down. Almost 3 years later, he finished in performing that very task but it took another couple of years before it finally saw publication.

How fortunate are millions of readers throughout the world for those persistent daughters!