A couple of days ago I was struggling to settle in for the evening at home, so I decided to to go driving for a bit to clear my head.

Inevitably I ended up in the countryside and I found a road I hadn’t driven on before. I’ve driven most of the roads in our county so when I found one I’d not been down before I couldn’t resist but give it a go.

The road quickly narrowed into a single car track, but the road surface was decent enough so I kept on driving. I hadn’t gone very far before I spotted a rabbit in the road. These little fellas don’t seem to have any road sense and zig and zag all over the place, so I slowed right down to around 10mph as I didn’t want to hit him.

I continued on at this speed as I knew there would be other rabbits around and being a fan of Watership Down I did not want to hurt any of them. I continued driving for another half a mile or so then something really strange happened.

Around twenty or so rabbits appeared from the verge on the left hand side of the road and ran straight across into the verge on the right hand side of the road. No zig or zag. No fear of the car engine sound or headlights. Just across the road as fast as they could. I have never seen so many rabbits on the move as a group before in the wild, and I’ve never seen a rabbit bolting as fast as they could in a straight line across the road.

I can only assume that something had put the fear of God into the whole colony of rabbits and they decided they had to get away as quickly as possible. As I was driving I couldn’t get out of the car to see where they went, but I did glance to the left to see what on earth could have put such fear into them. I thought I saw some eye-shine around six feet off the ground, but I couldn’t be sure. No sooner had I seen it, it disappeared. I couldn’t say for sure who or what was there, if indeed something was.

I just know the behaviour of the rabbits was really strange and I’ve never seen anything like it whilst driving on country roads where rabbits are common.