On 23 May 2022 Nicola
Chester was announced as the winner of the Richard Jefferies Award for
the best nature writing published in 2021 for her book titled On Gallows Down and published by Chelsea
Green.
On
Gallows Down is
strongly rooted in the author’s background and formative years in the Newbury
area―a period that included the Greenham Common Peace Camp and Newbury bypass
protests―followed by her own family life in cottages on the Highclere and Inkpen
estates. The book is a seamless
blend of memoir and natural and social history, evoking a vivid sense of the
impact and influence particular places and landscapes have had on the writer.
After
witnessing the disruption and destruction of the environment and its wildlife for military and road-building purposes, Chester’s own early interest in the
natural world became a deep-seated commitment to learning and understanding
more about it. In some of the most vivid and personal sections of the book, she
tells of her isolated life as the mother of young children, exploring the
Highclere estate with them, immersing herself in the local landscape with its
long history of great wealth and rural poverty, and delighting in her
observations of badgers, foxes and deer.
Professor
Barry Sloan, Chair of the Richard Jefferies Society and
of the panel of judges said:
On Gallows Down is not only an
eloquent celebration of nature and landscape and of their indispensable value
for human mental and emotional health and well-being; it is also unsentimental
and alert to the dangers that threaten wildlife and the open countryside, and
shows the author’s own experiences of resistance to suggestions for more
environmentally friendly land management. It will appeal to a wide readership
both as a personal narrative and for its thoughtful reflections on the
challenges facing the natural world.
Nicola
Chester commented:
This Award means the
absolute world to me. Richard Jefferies has long been a companion of mine: from
books lent to me by my Granddad in childhood, to walking a close, worked,
peopled and atmospheric wild landscape, just a few hills over from his, populated
by white chalk horses. ‘Belonging’ should not be about wherever we are from,
but how we engage with a place and how its story becomes part of ours (and our
story, its). I like to think Jefferies would recognise that to be more
important than ever now. The urgency to stem the loss of our wildlife is
increasing at a similar rate to that with which we are realising the depth,
power and joy in connecting with it―the necessity of it.
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