Nicola Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine's Nature Writer of the Year Award - this is her first book.

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.Part nature writing, part memoir, On Gallows Down is an essential, unforgettable read for fans of Helen Macdonald, Melissa Harrison and Isabella Tree. 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. Nicola Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Nature Writer of the Year Award - this is her first book. This history implicitly highlights the continuing class inequalities entrenched in the English countryside. In evoking the history of the British welfare state through the nearby village of Speenhamland, where the Berkshire Bread Act of the late 18th century originated, Chester shows how poverty continues through generations, with the same family names of those listed in the workhouse records now belonging to children receiving free school meals. I slightly envied that. As a Bristolian who left Bristol to go to university and has never returned to the city, or its environs, to live, I do feel, when I visit, that it is home. And my memories of it are of wildlife seen and places explored with friends and relatives. But I have lived the last 45 years or so in Cambridge, and two separate parts of Northamptonshire, as well as stays in Oxford, Aberdeen and abroad. And my work has taken me very regularly to offices in Sandy and meetings in London and many other places so I’ve not really been embedded in a place for a long time, and I slightly envy those who have and admire those, like in this book, who can put that feeling across so well.

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 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. Her home in Inkpen for the past 19 years has been a small rented cottage, the property of wealthy landowners. It is in an ancient part of England inhabited since the Mesolithic era, and west Berkshire remains steeped in feudal propriety. Gamekeepers have been known to stalk the hills on the lookout for trespassing naturalists. “‘It used to get really unsettling,” says Chester.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 Nicola Chester has written about nature and our relationship with it for nearly two decades. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and the RSPB’s first and longest-running female columnist. She writes as a form of joy, and resistance to the loss of nature, in the hope it will galvanise others to help stem its catastrophic decline. 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. 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.

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.for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. There is a book launch at Hungerford Bookshop on October 9, which will include a signing, a reading and an interview with Nicola.

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.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.