Review On the shelf
n By Mark Metcalf
A LAND WORTH FIGHTING FOR
On gallows down – Place, protest and belonging. A memoir by Nicola Chester. Published by Chelsea Green Publishing UK. RRP £20 (although can be found for less).
Nicola Chester’s highly descriptive book is packed with personal anecdotes and political observations about her local North Wessex Downs chalk landscape. Set in the backdrop of Highclere Castle, Inkpen Beacon with its gallows, Watership Down, Greenham Common and Newbury, where Chester moved to in her junior school years after her father, a firefighter, began work there.
What shines through is Chester’s love for the countryside, the wildlife and ordinary people, many descended from families from generations ago. Chester grew up alongside Greenham Common’s Women’s Peace Camp, the women of which in the early 1980s, opposed the UK’s agreement to house American nuclear weapons on the Common. Unlike many locals, she admired the women – and it’s that spirit of protest that has never left her.
Chester’s book highlights a rich seam of local resistance. She actively opposed the construction of the Newbury Road Bypass. The dissent, peaking in 1996, led to some of the
largest anti-road protests in European history in which over 800 people were arrested and nearly 10,000 mature trees were felled.
Chester highlights the subsequent massive loss of habitat and wildlife by charting the evocative singing of a nightingale but whose attempts to find a partner over four consecutive summers inevitably fail as by now the nearest nightingale colony is four miles away at Greenham Common. It is a tale of great sorrow consistent with many other locations internationally.
Chester beautifully describes local landscapes that she regularly walks. She constantly highlights the struggles of wildlife to survive when pitched against the needs of commerce – by 1970 pesticides had killed off 96 per cent of the otter population, which is thankfully now slowly recovering.
Chester is a tenant with her husband, a paramedic, on a large estate. It means if she hopes to preserve landscape practices suitable for wildlife, such as the badger cubs she gets remarkably
38 uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2022
close to, then she must seek to persuade landowners to take up government stewardship projects and work with conservation groups.
It’s a struggle with mixed results on a land whose roots lie in revolt. In 1830 Iocal people unsuccessfully took part in the Captain Swing uprising by agricultural workers against harsh working conditions and rural poverty.
And it’s a struggle that remains ongoing as in Chester’s local schools today. Over a third of students’ families are on benefits and free school meals, while a third of people live in rented, tied or council-owned homes.
These are squeezed in alongside private schools, second homes and big country estates on which food production is often set aside for high paying visitors to shoot animals for sport.
Clearly the fight to save the environment is intimately connected with the need to create a much more equal society.
Getty Images
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40
