Nicola Chester
Nature Writer and Activist
Nicola Chester is a writer and an activist for nature, and has been called an ‘early, female pioneer of the new nature writing’ (Dominic Couzens). She and her family are tenants in an estate workers cottage at the heart of the North Wessex Downs.
Nicola has been writing professionally for over 20 years, after winning BBC Wildlife Magazine‘s Nature Writer of the Year award. She is the RSPB’s first and longest-running female columnist as well as writing a column for Countryfile Magazine and is a Guardian Country Diarist. Between 2003 and 2023, she wrote a weekly, then fortnightly column for the the award-winning Newbury Weekly News, exploring her local wildlife and our relationship with it.
Nicola’s most recent book, On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging, was published by Chelsea Green in 2021. Her next book, Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community, is due to be published in September 2025.
On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging
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.
From the girl catching the eye of the “peace women” of Greenham Common to the young woman protesting the loss of ancient and beloved trees, and as a mother raising a family in a farm cottage in the shadow of grand, country estates, this is the story of how Nicola Chester came to write – as a means of protest. The story of how she discovered the rich seam of resistance that runs through her village of Newbury and its people – from the English Civil War to the Swing Riots and the battle against the Newbury Bypass. And the story of the hope she finds in the rewilding of Greenham Common after the military left, the stories told by the landscapes of Watership Down, the gallows perched high on Inkpen Beacon and Highclere Castle (the setting of Downtown Abbey).
Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community
Set mostly in the fields and farms below Gallows Down, Ghosts of the Farm is a delicious, urgent kind of haunting. It tells the true story of Miss White, a single woman in the 1940s, who hitched up her caravan to pursue her farming dreams. It tells how, reading her diary, I found many parallels and increasing coincidences and was moved to interrogate my own farming ghosts, in those same fields, and in Canada as a cowgirl in the late 80s.
It’s a book about the rural home front during the Second World War, and other, often queer women who farmed then, much-loved, at the heart of their communities – but were then lost from view. It’s a book about rural working women, and finding a way to ‘farm’ in different, diverse ways.
Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community will be published by Chelsea Green in the UK and US on 30th September.
