Name: First Illustrated Edition of Watership Down
Author: Richard Adams

New edition of Watership Down with the map by Marilyn Hemmet reprinted in colour and reoriented to fold out. 

The first edition contains a folding map drawn by Marilyn Hemmett, orientated with north to the left. It traces the rabbits’ journey across a recognisably Hampshire landscape, extending from Sandleford Park in the south to Kingsclere and Whitchurch in the north. With its gridlines and Ordnance Survey–like presentation, the map grounds the fantasy in precise topography, while also identifying key fictionalised sites: the River Test, Nuthanger Farm, the ancient Harroway, Efrafa, and of course Watership Down itself. In later editions, the map was re-oriented and redrawn for easier consultation, but its function remained the same – to lend Adams’s fable a geographical realism that reinforced its allegorical resonances, much as the maps of Utopia and Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World had done in previous centuries. Subsequent works by Adams – such as the ‘Beklan Empire’ in Shardik (1974) – went on to map other fantastic territories, but none gained a foothold in the public imagination in the same way as Watership Down.

Ex Carta

This illustrated Penguin edition of Watership Down reproduces the novel’s map in a redrawn and reoriented form, making the geography of the rabbits’ journey easier for readers to follow. Despite these adjustments, the map retains its original purpose: anchoring Adams’s tale of exile and survival within a detailed and recognisable English landscape.

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Richard Adams’s (1920–2016) debut novel Watership Down is both an adventure story and an allegorical meditation on survival, freedom, and exile. First told as impromptu car-journey tales to his daughters, the story grew into a full-length novel centred on the rabbits Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and their companions as they flee the destruction of their warren and search for a new home. Despite its origins as an entertainment for children, the final novel as written demonstrates clear appeal to adults as well. Adams later acknowledged that his experiences during Operation Market Garden in 1944 informed the novel’s narrative of displacement, comradeship, and endurance. Other critics have identified wider themes of dystopia, ecological threat, and archetypal notions of kingship and ‘just rule’.

Initially rejected by multiple publishers, Watership Down became a runaway hit on its eventual appearance with Collings in 1972, winning both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. This resulted, in the UK, in a ‘very considerable surge in the publication of animal fantasies’, as publishers sought to emulate its success. Its enduring popularity has led to adaptations in film, television, radio, and stage, most notably the 1978 animated version directed by Martin Rosen, alleged to have traumatised many a childhood with its unflinching depictions of the stark violence of the natural world.

In the first illustrated edition, the map was re-oriented and redrawn for easier consultation, but its function remained the same – to lend Adams’s fable a geographical realism that reinforced its allegorical resonances, much as the maps of Utopia and Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World had done in previous centuries. Subsequent works by Adams – such as the ‘Beklan Empire’ in Shardik (1974) – went on to map other fantastic territories, but none gained a foothold in the public imagination in the same way as Watership Down.