On Gallows Down: Place, Protest and Belonging
NICOLA CHESTER
(CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING, 256 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

I’ll hold my hands up and admit it – before I read this fascinating book celebrating the wildlife, people and history of one corner of Berkshire, I didn’t even know where Berkshire was on the map. Or that its border with Hampshire is a beautiful land of rolling chalk hills, burial barrows and dew ponds. I knew nothing of its tradition of honourable dissent from the Swing Riots of the 1830s to the heroic women of Greenham Common and the eco-warriors who tried to stave off the tree-destroying disaster of the Newbury bypass, an action that effectively stopped major road-building projects for decades. To my shame, I didn’t even know that Watership Down, one of the world’s greatest books, is Berkshire born and bred. Or that the world’s first social security system was pioneered at Speenhamland, Berkshire.