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

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The Combe Gibbet is also the start of a scenic 16 mile off-road race to Overton organised by the Overton Harriers and Athletic Club. The race, which is typically in late March / early April of each year, is one of the few true off-road point to point running races in Britain, coaches taking competitors to the start. Part nature writing, part memoir, On Gallows Down is an essential, unforgettable read for fans of Helen Macdonald, Melissa Harrison and Isabella Tree. Nicola said: “I think my love for nature stems from childhood. Wherever we have lived we have found nature, we have found woods and we have explored them and most of all loved being in them.” Nicola Chester Ref: 34-0221 (50385854)

Nowadays the hill and its gibbet it is a popular local tourist attraction with good views of the surrounding area. It is also popular with hang gliders and paragliders.

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. Nicola dated the book’s genesis to the moment when, 25 years ago, she queued up to talk to a TV news reporter about Newbury Bypass and froze. She went home and cried, and realized she’d have to write her feelings down instead. Words generally come to her at the time of a sighting, as she thinks about how she would tell someone how amazing it was.

Font adjustments – users, can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more. It was work. I found wry comfort in discovering that John Clare, the agricultural labouring poet, worked with the enclosure gangs – the very enclosures he lamented. Enclosure brought an opportunity of employment Clare could not turn down: fencing, hedging, the destruction of trees or lime-burning – all to enclose the former freedoms of his own parish. It also brought fresh faces and new opportunities to socialise. Clare scholar Professor Simon Kövesi wrote in his book John Clare: Nature, Criticism, History: ‘There was no economic space for Clare to consider not doing the paid work of enclosing his village, or of lime-burning; choice is a product of socio-economic power, and he had none. There was no front for resistance because poverty denied space for that activity’. Nicola writes a well-regarded Nature Notes column for the IMG_3102Award-Winning Newbury Weekly News (circ, 20,000) that explores local wildlife, landscape, weather and our relationship with it – and has done so for seventeen years. She is the longest-running female columnist for the RSPB members magazine Nature’s Home (formerly Birds, 1.3 million readers). Evocative and inspiring…environmental protest, family, motherhood and…nature.’ Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground, Costa Novel Award Winner 2021My home was not mine. With a change of someone else’s heart or plan, or a rent hike, we could effectively be homeless with three children and a dog; a whole community built up and belonged to – gone in a couple of months’ notice. There was nothing else we could afford to rent locally. It sometimes felt like a precarious existence, and had been so since I left home, almost 30 years before.

An evocative and inspiring memoir.’ Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground and winner of Costa Novel Award 2021 Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration 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.The gibbet was erected in 1676 for the purpose of gibbeting the bodies of George Broomham and Dorothy Newman and has only ever been used for them. The gibbet was placed in such a prominent location as a warning, to deter others from committing crimes. George and Dorothy, in an adulterous relationship, were hanged for murdering George's wife Martha, and their son Robert after they discovered them together on the downs. The lovers' crime was witnessed by Mad Thomas, who managed to convey what he had seen to the authorities.