Nicola Chester

Nature Writer and Activist

rural ghosts

  • Nature Notes

    Lamplight, Wessex Heights. Ours is a literary landscape, like much of Britain. The land has a pull on us and often, the most enduring way to express that is through words, conserving or farming it; planting woods, naming fields, woods and recording it on maps. I spoke recently at The Museum of English Rural Life […]

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  • Nature Notes

    Pulling Ragwort. I love the ritual of pulling ragwort. We make a heap of it, slapping bites from horse flies with the clap of a flat palm and a smear of our own blood. For a few weeks, I’ll wear an unscrubbable half-moon of dark juices beneath my fingernails and know its July stink and […]

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