Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing Prize 2022 and highly commended by the judges
On Gallows Down is a memoir of a life shaped by landscape.
As a new mother, Nicola Chester walked the chalk hills to give her children roots, teaching them names and waymarks to find their way home. She waits for the return of the cuckoo, watches a badger cub at night and finds a mole in her garden. It is also the story of how she came to write and to protest; she unearths the seam of resistance that runs through Newbury’s past, from the Civil Wars to the Swing Riots and the women of the Greenham Common Peace Camps. A resistance that continues today against the destruction of wildlife through modern farm estate management.
On Juniper Hill
Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise has always felt like home. A romantic notion, perhaps, from someone brought up in the 1970s and ’80s, rather than a century ago, as Flora was. I first read it when I...
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