WOULD you be a happy bunny if I rabbited on? Or shall I pull a rabbit out of the hat and hop to it? Perhaps you are caught like a rabbit in the headlights?
No surer sign of an animal’s importance exists than multiple entries in the national book of idioms. Or places named for the creature. Perhaps you are reading this article about ‘coneys’, as the European rabbit is popularly called across Britain, on Coneygar Hill, in Dawlish Warren or on Braunton Burrows?
Then again, Oryctolagus cuniculus is surely unique in being so many things to so many. Emblem of Easter and bane of Mr McGregors everywhere, the rabbit is simultaneously the anthropomorphic hero of children’s books, fur-trim, pie-filler and the nation’s third-favourite companion animal. One million pet bunnies abide with us.
Quite a record, for a relatively recent arrival to our shores—or re-arrival. Britain had its own native population of rabbits before the exterminating Ice Age and the animals were reintroduced by the Romans, but failed to flourish, only to be imported in the 12th century by the invading Normans. Peter, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail, however, escaped the Norman meat-and-fur farm and bred in the wild like… rabbits. By the 1950s, the British countryside pitter-pattered under the paws of 100 million individuals.
Hippity-hopping over the lawn in the evening, velvet nose a-twitch, the rabbit is a furry bundle of cuteness. How does such a meek being conquer the countryside? To understand the rabbit’s success story, one needs, like Alice in Wonderland, to pop down the rabbit hole.
この記事は Country Life UK の April 13, 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は Country Life UK の April 13, 2022 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
