The Combe where Bigwig met the Fox,

in June 1983.

The combe (or coomb, i.e. a small valley, especially on a hillside) where Bigwig met the fox.

From chapter 30, 'A New Journey':          'Less than half a mile away to the west, they came upon a spinney adjoining the southern edge of Caesar's Belt. To the west again was a shallow, dry downland combe, perhaps four hundred yards across and overgrown with weeds and rough, yellowing summer tussocks.' and from chapter 32, 'Across the Iron Road':         'The rough, weed-covered ground of the combe sloped away below them, a long dip bounded on the north by Caesar's Belt. The last of the setting sun shone straight up it through a break in the trees. The fox was below them and still some way off.'

        You are looking north to Caesar's Belt, the local name for the Portway roman road. Hazel and his rabbits would have been visible close to the edge of the trees in the centre-left as the golden sunset streamed in from the far left of the picture, where the pylon line is visible in the original slides. It has not survived the conversion to JPEG format. Efrafa and the Iron Road lies behind you. This panoramic view was taken through a gap in the hedges that line the road which runs behind you and then turns northwards to cut across the right of the view. Once in the trees it turns east again and joins the roman road for a number of miles. The Belt warren (later to be named Vleflain) lies just beyond the trees to the right, on the other side of the Belt. The combe sounds to have been an area of open rough ground at one time, now it is very much more productive thanks (or no thanks depending on your viewpoint) to modern farming techniques.

Us rabbits don’t swear… much. When we need to show how strongly we feel we usually say Frith is somewhere odd, like “Frith up a tree”, “Frith in a mist”, "Frith in a pond" or my favourite, “Frith in a ditch”. I’ll tell you another thing: I like the Efrafan attitude to does: If you want a doe you can… Ooow! What was that for, Hyzenthlay?

I almost rejected these photographs, in that I was not going to use them for these pages. They didn't seem to show very much on their own, they were just shots of generic countryside. Then I remembered I sometimes took panorama sequences of two or three shots taken with identical camera settings from the same spot. When I put these two together I instantly remembered what they really were, for years I had forgetten I had taken this pair and had never seen them together. This photo was kindly re-touched for me by Inkwolf using Adobe PhotoShop.