From the Wainwright Nature Prize Highly Commended author Nicola Chester, a rural narrative between two women in two different eras who both wanted to become farmers.

"Nicola Chester will come to be seen as a Nan Shepherd of our time."—Nick Acheson, author of The Meaning of Geese

This is the story of Miss White, a woman who lived in the author’s village 80 years ago, a pioneer who realised her ambition to become a farmer during the Second World War, and how she worked to become accepted within this community. Nicola Chester, too, dreamed of becoming a farmer but working with horses was the only path open to her. Was it easier for women to become farmers in the 1940s than it is now?

Moving between Nicola’s own attempts to work outdoors and Miss White’s desire to farm a generation earlier, Nicola explores the parallels between their lives – and the differences. Miss White buys a derelict farm and begins to renovate and modernize it. As ghost (barn) owls flit between these two worlds, Nicola draws connections with farming and rural life in both times, from the role of women in rural communities in the modern day to Miss White’s experience in the 1940s. And how those farming modernizations have left the modern day with both a denuded landscape and farming community and a disconnect from nature.

Increasingly, Nicola’s research into past and present interlinks and illuminates her own battles to raise awareness of rural communities, outdoor work and the ongoing loss of farmland birds that were so familiar to Miss White.

About The Author

Nicola is the author of the award-winning memoir On Gallows Down; Place, Protest and Belonging (Chelsea Green, 2021). One of the early female pioneers of nature writing, she has written a column for the RSPB magazine since 2004 after winning BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Nature Writer of the Year Award. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and writes for BBC Countryfile Magazine as well as other online and print publications. Nicola’s writing also features in several anthologies, most recently Wild Service, (Bloomsbury, 2024, ed. by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses) Under the Changing Skies, The Best of The Guardian Country Diary, 2018-2024 (Faber, 2024, ed. Paul Fleckney) and Women On Nature (Unbound, 2021, ed. Katharine Norbury). She wrote for the RSPB’s Junior and Youth Magazines for many years, inspiring many of today’s young wildlife campaigners. A former school librarian, she is a judge for the inaugural 2025 Climate Fiction Prize, launched at the Hay Festival, and has been a guest speaker and taught sessions for undergraduate, post-graduate and MA Creative Writing students at Cambridge University, Bournemouth University and Sheffield University, and for the MA in Nature and Travel Writing at Bath Spa. A passionate campaigner and activist for nature, Nicola and her family are tenants in an estate worker’s cottage at the heart of the North Wessex Downs in the UK.