An evocative and inspiring memoir.’ Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground and winner of Costa Novel Award 2021 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 a farm cottage in the shadow of grand, country estates, this is the story of how Nicola Chester came to write – as a means of protest. The story of how she discovered the rich seam of resistance that runs through her village of Newbury and its people – from the English Civil War to the Swing Riots and the battle against the Newbury Bypass. And the story of the hope she finds in the rewilding of Greenham Common after the military left, the stories told by the landscapes of Watership Down, the gallows perched high on Inkpen Beacon and Highclere Castle (the setting of Downtown Abbey). 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.” By ‘place’, I mean what a place might mean to us – the landscape or its historic or wild inhabitants, as part of our own narrative story. By ‘protest’ I wonder how we might offer a resistance to the loss of nature and our connection with it? Protest can be done in small ‘ordinary-seeming’ ways, or ‘big ways’. We protest however we can and risk is a personal, subjective thing. Sometimes, we don’t even register what we do as protest. These acts can be effective in ways we might not realise until much later; who knows what support or influence they might offer, down the line.

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). Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements. On Gallows Down is about how Nicola came to realise that it is she who can decide where she belongs, for home is a place in nature and imagination, which must be protected through words and actions.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. Jonathan Stevenson is a forester and arborist living, working, and teaching sustainable woodland management in North Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion. to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.

Part memoir, part nature writing and entirely impressive. I was completely bowled over by this book and finished it with huge admiration for Nicola Chester. Part nature writing, part memoir, On Gallows Down is an essential, unforgettable read for fans of Helen Macdonald, Melissa Harrison and Isabella Tree. 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.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 a farm cottage in the shadow of grand, country estates, this is the story of how Nicola Chester came to write - as a means of protest. The story of how she discovered the rich seam of resistance that runs through her village of Newbury and its people - from the English Civil War to the Swing Riots and the battle against the Newbury Bypass. And the story of the hope she finds in the rewilding of Greenham Common after the military left, the stories told by the landscapes of Watership Down, the gallows perched high on Inkpen Beacon and Highclere Castle (the setting of Downtown Abbey). 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. 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. 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.” 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.