Walking the route: on pilgrimage, performance, and Watership Down
Durational, geographical, and embodied acts of understanding
Last weekend, I walked the route of the fictional rabbits from Richard Adams’ novel Watership Down.
Not for fitness, not for transport, but as something closer to a pilgrimage.
I followed, as closely as I could, the route of the rabbits’ adventure; from Sandleford near Newbury, across fields and commons, up to the Down, and further on toward Efrafa. Past the iron bridge. Toward the river where Hazel and co escaped the tyranny of General Woundwort. Through landscapes that are at once entirely real and deeply fictional.
It was around 17 miles. Just over six hours.
And somewhere along the way, it became something else entirely.
Walking as performance
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about durational, gestural, and geographical acts in performance and activism. Actions that unfold across time and space. Acts that don’t represent something so much as inhabit it.
This walk felt like that.
There was no audience, at least not in the conventional sense. No script (apart from the novel). No clear outcome. But there was intention, repetition, and a kind of embodied enquiry.
What does it mean to follow a nonhuman narrative through human geography?
What happens when fiction is mapped onto land, and then walked?
Can movement become a form of understanding?
The longer I walked, the less it felt like I was retracing a story, and the more it felt like I was entering into a relationship with it.
Geography as memory
One of the striking things about the novel of Watership Down is how grounded it is in place.
Richard Adams was meticulous. The landscapes are not vague backdrops; they are specific, textured, navigable. There are maps. There are routes. There is a logic to movement.
And so, walking it, I began to notice the strange overlap between fiction and reality:
The gorse on Newtown Common, exactly as described in the audiobook, in real time
The graveyard, quiet and ordinary, but suddenly charged with narrative memory
Nuthanger Farm, no longer just a setting, but a place I could stand in and tremble
The pylon at the base of the Down, stark and looming, just as imagined and depicted
The railway arch, the shifts in terrain, the open expanse of the hill
All of it was there.
And yet, none of it was.
Because what I was following was not just a route, but a story layered onto the land. A nonhuman mythology moving through human space.
Duration and fatigue
By the fourth hour, my body started to shift.
The walk stopped being observational and became physical. Legs heavy. Breath deeper. Pace slower. Attention narrowing and widening in waves.
There’s something important about duration here.
To walk for six hours is to give up control of time in a small way. You can’t rush it. You can’t skip ahead. You have to move through space at the speed of your own body.
And in doing so, something changes:
You begin to feel the scale of distance differently
You become more aware of terrain, weather, exposure
You start to experience movement not as choice, but as necessity
The weather didn’t settle either. Cloud, wind, sun, sleet, then sun again. It added a kind of instability, a reminder that landscape is never neutral. It presses back.
I found myself wondering what it means for animals to move through these spaces not as walkers, but as beings whose survival depends on it.
Not a metaphor. A condition.
Gesture and attention
There were small moments that stayed with me.
Walking through the graveyard, I slowed down instinctively. Not because I needed to, but because it felt like the right gesture. A kind of acknowledgement.
Crossing certain thresholds, gates, paths, edges of fields, I noticed a shift in attention. As if the act of passing through mattered.
These are small things, but they accumulate.
In performance, we often think about gesture as something intentional, designed. But here, gesture emerged through attention and context. Through being in the space, rather than performing for it.
The walk became a series of quiet, almost imperceptible actions that carried meaning because of where they happened.
Pilgrimage and animality
I keep coming back to the word pilgrimage.
Not in a religious sense, exactly. But in the sense of moving toward something that has already shaped you.
Watership Down was one of the texts that nudged me, slowly but persistently, toward veganism and animal rights. Not through argument, but through world-building.
It gave nonhuman animals:
Agency
Mythology
Spirituality
Social structure
It asked me to take seriously the idea that nonhuman lives are not just biological, but meaningful.
Walking the route felt like a way of returning to that origin point. Not nostalgically, but physically. Testing what it means to carry that story into the present.
What this opens up
I’m interested in what acts like this might offer to performance and activism more broadly.
Not as spectacle, but as practice.
Durational acts that shift our relationship to time
Geographical acts that root ideas in place
Gestural acts that emerge through attention rather than design
There’s something here about understanding through doing. Not explaining, not representing, but moving through something until it begins to make sense in the body.
I’m curious if others have had similar experiences; walking, tracing, following, inhabiting stories or landscapes as a way of understanding them differently.
Best wishes,
Ben