A LAND WORTH FIGHTING FOR
ON GALLOWS DOWN – a memoir
Place, Protest and Belonging
Nicola Chester
Nicola Chester’s highly
descriptive book is packed with personal anecdotes and political observations
about her local North Wessex Downs chalk landscape. This comprises of Highclere
Castle, (the location for Downton Abbey) 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 Women’s Peace
Camp, the women that opposed the UK’s agreement to house American nuclear
weapons on the Common. Unlike many locals, she admired, despite lacking political
awareness, the women - and it’s a spirit of protest that has never left her.
Chester also ‘resented the American soldiers for their
perceived warmongering.’ She was delighted that when the Americans did finally
leave the airbase it was bought by West Berkshire Council in 1997 and a massive
conservation project that has regenerated the heathland was started.
Chester’s book highlights a rich seam of local
resistance and she herself actively opposed - on the very spot where the
Roundheads and Cavaliers had battled one another during the English Civil War –
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 4 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, often with her three children and/or a gamekeeper. She constantly
highlights the struggles of wildlife to survive when pitched against the needs
of commerce such that by 1970 pesticides had killed off 96% of the otter
population, which is thankfully now slowly recovering.
Chester, who in her mid-20s became the first member of
her family to attend a university, is a librarian and a regular columnist for
the RSPB members’ magazine, Nature’s Home. She 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
close to, then she must seek to persuade landowners to take up government
stewardship projects and work with conservation groups.
It is a struggle with mixed results. This mirrors the
historical experiences of local people. In 1830 some of them unsuccessfully revolted
as part of the Captain Swing uprising by agricultural workers in southern and eastern England against
harsh working conditions and
rural poverty brought on in part by the loss of common land. One of
those involved, Walter Winterbourne, was sentenced to death and only recently
pardoned. He was a relative of a tractor driver on the estate where Chester
lives.
And it’s a struggle that remains ongoing as in Chester’s
local schools today over a third of students’ families are in receipt of
benefits and free school meals whilst 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 very often food production is set
aside for high paying visitors to shoot defenceless animals for sport.
Clearly the fight to save the environment is intimately
connected with the need to create a much more equal society.
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