Chester wins Richard Jefferies Award for nature writing with On Gallows Down

Nicola Chester has won the Richard Jefferies Award for the best nature writing published in 2021 with her book On Gallows Down (Chelsea Green).

On Gallows Down is 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 described as “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”.

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.”

The book was chosen from a shortlist featuring Birdsong in a Time of Silence by Steven Lovatt (Penguin Particular Books), Goshawk Summer: A New Forest Season Unlike Any Other by James Aldred (Elliott & Thompson), Ice Rivers by Jemma Wadham (Allen Lane), Islands of Abandonment: Life in the Post-Human Landscape by Cal Flyn (William Collins) and The Sea is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides by Adam Nicolson (Collins)

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.”

Judges were drawn from the Richard Jefferies Society, which administers the prize, and from its sponsors, the White Horse Bookshop in Marlborough.