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

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There is a book launch at Hungerford Bookshop on October 9, which will include a signing, a reading and an interview with Nicola. Charting a life lived in - and through - rural landscapes, Chester writes with a painterly eye. Her descriptions of nature and wildlife are staggeringly evocative - sensory, but never overblown or sentimental. Rather, her style has an elegant, measured beauty as she tells a personal story of protest and resistance, of a profound connection to the earth and nature, to offer a story of hope and connectedness in fractured times. The "Combe Gibbet" Race takes in Walbury Hill, Pilot Hill beyond it and Ladle Hill and the edge of Watership Down before entering Overton, the source of the River Test. Newbury (and West Berkshire in general) may not be flashy or particularly famous, but it has natural wonders worth celebrating and a rich history of rebellion that Nicola Chester plumbs here. A hymn-like memoir of place as much as of one person’s life, her book posits that the quiet moments of connection with nature and the rights of ordinary people are worth fighting for.

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 Nicola Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Nature Writer of the Year Award - this is her first book.For budding writers, Nicola has some great advice: “Read as widely as you can, about anything and everything, and write what you love as if nobody is ever going to read it but you.”

Indeed, the cover of On Gallows Down is a photograph taken by Nicola of her three children and dog by Combe Gibbet. On Gallows Down is a powerful, personal story shaped by a landscape deeply loved; one that ripples and undulates with protest, change, hope – and the search for home. As soon as the family arrived in a new place, her mum would take them down the footpaths with the dogs to explore their new home and these early experiences with nature continue to influence her. I like the cover although I’m not sure that it tells me what to expect from the book – but I like it; 7/10. On Gallows Downis a powerful, personal story shaped by a landscape; one that ripples and undulates with protest, change, hope – and the search for home.

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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. In everything I did, I tried to spread the word. I took writing and wildlife workshops into schools (and out of them) and the ’keeper and I did talks and guided walks, attempting to show how a farming and shooting estate could support wildlife too. We did a series of talks for some influential American ladies who were guests at the Big House. It was a hopeful attempt, and one I believed in. There was plenty of push and pull during our talks, plenty of banter, open disagreement and good-humoured challenge. I thought, ultimately, it was working. A landscape doesn’t forget its stories. It wears them like lines on an old face, markings on an old body. Jonathan Stevenson is a forester and arborist living, working, and teaching sustainable woodland management in North Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion.

They were enormous animals with great big antlers. We stood completely still as they stampeded around us. It was incredible to experience but also terrifying at the same time. I remember going home and trying to put into words how exciting and visceral it was. I could smell their breath!”

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Font adjustments – users, can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more. What do you do when you no longer recognise the place you grew up in? When it has been flayed and torn off the surface of the earth; burnt, excavated heaped up and built on with structures you struggle to make sense of. This feeling of grief and disorientation was new, distressing and seemed to permeate everything. Place was everything to me. I had been uprooted before but now, it seemed, the very place I stood upon was torn up by its roots.”