‘Wow!’ you say and want to stop the car and grab your camera and capture the uncatchable – an extraordinary sunset just across that field, past those leafless trees, out over the far beyond of the chalk downland you’re driving across, so striking it seems despite all that to be almost within reach.
So you speed up a bit, look for a lay-by, and fail to find one. You look for a turn to the left, there’s not one of those either and the sunset’s shifting, changing, maybe waning before your eyes.
You slow, you take another peek and it all disappears behind some trees casting them into bright silhouette as a young van driver comes up behind you, threatening.
You speed up again and miss the only lay-by because you can’t stop with the van so close and the sky’s turned from blue to weird green and the clouds are haloed in gold and the sun’s rays shoot up out of them like the last moments of an opera when someone was dying but not wanting to leave.
A fingerpost far ahead, indicating a left.
You speed even more, scudding westward around a bend, the van left behind, the sun suddenly threatening your eyes as the sun visor is pulled down with one hand to save your vision and you turn the wheel hard to the left with the other, making the left and looking for a place to stop.
The van roars by behind, a youthful passenger’s jeering fist in the air. The road dips straight ahead Roman-like and then up the rolling landscape. It veers left again and the sunset moves off to the right, the clouds moving too, doing strange things with the rays which spread out, bifurcate, disappear, reappear and settle down to something less than they were a moment before.
A gate to a field, a place to stop, a car coming towards you in the distance, its sidelights already on.
But the sunset’s still amazing.
You grab your rucksack, , the zip sticks, you pull it anyway, it opens with a protesting rasp, and you take out the camera inside, fingers playing automatically with the settings as you climb out into the cold air, round the back of the car and into a great field of grey chalky soil.
You raise the camera and take a shot. Something’s captured at least.
The light’s going, the clouds shifting, the sky utterly magnificent and you’re smaller than an ant out on that wonderful fold of chalk, you’re there, here, now. No better place to be.
Another picture taken against the light and then a third and you look around and remember that a few miles from where you stand is Watership Down, the most famous fictional Down of all.
The clouds shift, the moment seems finally gone but you jump into the car to see if there’s still a different shot at the dying sun.
You stop again and climb out, more slowly now.
The clouds have gone and the sun’s just itself now, no haloes, no rays: its magnificent dying self beyond a hawthorn hedge and you take a few more shots as off to the right, where it’s already shadowed, and down by the hedge, where it’s almost black, rabbits appear: Fiver and his brother Hazel, Bigwig and General Woundwort.
The sun sets swiftly and you stand alone wondering what happened to Richard Adams who offered you lift once in his chauffeur-driven car from a literary gig in Birmingham and talked anthropomorphic story-telling all the way home like no-one before or since; and who paid you the compliment of having read your book as you read his.
The sun is almost gone and the camera’s no use any more.
You watch evening come. Just you and a chalky field whose subtle harrow lines disappear towards the last light in the sky; and a story that set your imagination alight so many years before, as great stories do; the cool breeze in your hair and the scampering of rabbits you can hear but no longer see.

Richard Adams is now 89 and lives not far from the downland his first novel immortalized. It had many rejections from publishers before it finally found a publishing home with Rex Collings and huge success: a story to warm the heart of every would-be writer. My last meeting with him was at a busy Society of Authors function when I went over to say hello. Fortunately I knew he could be, shall we say, irascible. He peered at me suspiciously and asked what I wrote and I said ‘Duncton Wood’. He replied very tartly, ‘No you didn’t. A fellow called Horwood wrote that.’ I decided it was best not to argue the point. Then, as now, I go to the shelves and hold Watership Down in my hands with pleasure and affection and hope that if the sun is setting finally on its author’s life it is doing so as beautifully, and gloriously as the sunset I chased yesterday across the Downs.