‘All this on our doorstep’: conservation and resistance on Gallows Down

The writer Nicola Chester views the Berkshire hill close to her village home as a focal point of belonging and guardianship towards nature

High on a ridge above the village of Inkpen in the North Wessex Downs, a gibbet looms like a sentinel. Every time you come up, you just have to give it a pat. It's the most grisly thing," laughs Nicola Chester. The gibbet was used to display the bodies of two murderous lovers in 1676. Since then, the centuries have seen the gibbet brought low by lightning, political vandalism and rot, only to be resurrected each time with oak trees felled from the same estate.

Chester titled her award-winning nature memoir, On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging, after the macabre structure, and the hill that takes its name. It's a beacon for home, but also a sending off' place. A hotspot for migrating birds. A gathering place for stories and a conduit for protest. From it, you can see every chapter of my book, and all the places I've ever lived," she says.