On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging (Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize 2022 for Nature Writing - Highly Commended)

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The story of a life shaped by landscape; of an enduring love of nature and the fierce desire to protect it – living as part of the rural working class in a ‘tied cottage’ on a country estate – and what it takes to feel like you belong.

Chester not only has skin in this place, but her head and heart are also fully invested in her care for the corner of Berkshire she calls home. We have never been on a holiday abroad, instead we would go walking through nature, through the fields, up the hill and explore the footpaths. It made sound a bit cliché, but when I think about my children, it is the hill that raised them.” On Gallows Down is a book (a memoir of landscape and place as much of a person) of several threads and themes that twist and twine together into a narrative rope. But the main strands are of place, protest and belonging. I want to take this opportunity to expand just a little, on what I mean by those themes – though to these writers, they may mean very different things indeed. That’s the joy of creative and personal interpretation. I hope you enjoy reading these pieces as much as I have enjoyed receiving and reading each one! I’m delighted to introduce them all:Additional functions – we provide users the option to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions. Nicola is a professional, reliable, published writer with over eighteen years experience. She is a Country Diarist for The Guardian and writes for BBC Countryfile Magazine, the RSPB’s Nature’s Home and BBC Wildlife Magazine. An evocative and inspiring memoir.’ Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground and winner of Costa Novel Award 2021 Jonathan Stevenson is a forester and arborist living, working, and teaching sustainable woodland management in North Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion. P.S. My husband and I attended the book launch event for On Gallows Down in Hungerford on Saturday evening. Nicola was interviewed by Claire Fuller, whose Women’s Prize-shortlisted novel Unsettled Ground is set in a fictional version of the village where Nicola lives.

On Gallows Down is a powerful, personal story shaped by a landscape; one that ripples and undulates with protest, change, hope - and the search for home.The library is a fantastic place. It’s not just about books, but about ideas and digital information literacy, and a real flow of that goes on between the students. It’s almost like anything can happen in there.”

for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. This is a memoir based firmly in a broad area of England, roughly speaking around Newbury, crossing county lines (no, not like that) and involving names familiar to so many of us: Greenham Common, the Newbury Bypass, and even Highclere aka Downton Abbey. It takes us from her childhood through to her children being just about grown up and various writing gigs and a book published alongside day jobs in libraries... and some remarkable changes of nature's fortune. I knew very little about some of the areas she talks about, but she brings them to life with her writing style and I also found myself googling pictures of the area to get more of a feel for the areas that meant so much to her over the years, and those areas that she fought so passionately to save and protect. From treetop protests at the Newbury Bypass to the grand Highclere Estate, On Gallows Down is that rare thing: nature writing as political as it is personal. -Melissa Harrison, author of The Stubborn Light of Things: A Nature Diary There is a book launch at Hungerford Bookshop on October 9, which will include a signing, a reading and an interview with Nicola.An evocative and inspiring memoir’.Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Groundand winner of Costa Novel Award 2021 Chester's writing has a lovely elasticity, dancing between wonder, introspection and anger as she moves from the particular to the universal...She belongs to the disappearing English, rural working class, and is intent on handing this baton to her three children, who play a part in the book. Chester also explores the familiar tension between wanting to write and being needed at home. The heady ecstasy of time carved out alone, in nature. The scrabble to earn a precarious living, and the insecurities of occupying a tied cottage. The idea of 'home' lies at the heart of this fierce, beautifully written, immersive book about one's place within the landscape. -Tessa Boase, author of Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

Nicola regularly goes out walking and exploring. Her favourite footpath goes up Gallows Down, starting in Inkpen and heading towards Combe Gibbet. It’s been an absolute privilege and pleasure to curate a response to the themes in my book, On Gallows Down, and I am thrilled to have some truly exciting, moving and thoughtful pieces by some truly wonderful writers that I admire very much, lined up for you. From the girl catching the eye of the ‘peace women’ of Greenham Common to the young woman protesting the loss of ancient and beloved trees, and as a mother raising a family in tied and tenanted farm cottages on grand, country estates, this is the story of how Nicola came to write – as a means of protest. Of how she discovered the rich seam of resistance that runs through Newbury’s people from the English Civil War to the Swing Riots and the battle against the Newbury Bypass, the hope she finds in the rewilding of Greenham Common after the military left, and the stories told by the landscapes of Watership Down, the gibbet perched high on Gallows Down and Highclere Castle. Nature is indelibly linked to belonging for Nicola. As well as writing for many different magazines, Nicola is the librarian at the John O’Gaunt school in Hungerford, a job which she thoroughly enjoys. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on

LoveReading Says

A powerful personal and political journey through place that charts the profound influence we have on nature, and that nature has on us. -Rob Cowen, author of Common Ground and The Heeding Change is afoot, however. The local keeper has gone and an outbreak of bird disease has left the shoot silent for the first time in a century. Throughout her life, Nicola has always written stories and describes herself as a ‘proper book worm’, but a pivotal moment came when she was protesting against the construction of the Newbury Bypass in 1996.