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

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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. She has now lived in Inkpen for 17 years, and has a son, 19, and two daughters who are 17 and 13. For the children, nature has played a key role in their upbringing. Since then, the sentiment has shifted and On Gallows Down has become more poignant and relevant than ever before. Combe Gibbet is a gibbet at the top of Gallows Down, near the village of Combe, Hampshire. It stands on the footpath, at the boundary of parishes and counties, and is named after the village of Combe. Over the ridge is the Berkshire village and parish of Inkpen. It is built on top of a long barrow known as the Inkpen long barrow. The long barrow is 200 feet long and 70 feet wide. This is close to the massive hill fort on Walbury Hill.

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. 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: Nicola regularly goes out walking and exploring. Her favourite footpath goes up Gallows Down, starting in Inkpen and heading towards Combe Gibbet. 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. I like the historical and literary references, I like the political stance of the author, I like the descriptions and observations of wildlife and I greatly admire the writing. This book will displace a current occupant of my shortlist of books of the year as it made a very strong impression on me. I believe that many readers of this blog will also be touched by these tales, and the skilful way in which they are told.

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Nicola Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine's Nature Writer of the Year Award - this is her first book. Part nature writing, part memoir, On Gallows Down is an essential, unforgettable read for fans of Helen Macdonald, Melissa Harrison and Isabella Tree.

I am a great believer in connection and linking things together, and the ultimate way of doing that was through this book. It is a memoire of place and a need to find a home, and to show ownership for a place that you don’t own. At the heart of the book is nature, family and home.” 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 Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Nature Writer of the Year Award - this is her first book. It is impossible to write with integrity about nature without protesting and resisting and waving a desperate red flag.

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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. In 2003, Chester won the BBC Wildlife Magazine’s nature writer of the year award, opening the way to a column in the RSPB’s magazine, Nature’s Home, and a career as a professional writer. She was the magazine’s first female contributor. “Just stay away from anything controversial,” she was told when she started. “They expected me to write about children, family and stuff,” she says. Instead, she used her platform to document the destruction and wonder of wildlife. Since 2019, she has contributed to the Guardian’s Country Diary, capturing episodes of loss and beauty with her distinctive style. 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 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.