Nicola Chester
@nicolawriting.bsky.social
Nature. Writer. Reader. Radical Rural. Guardian Country Diary, BBC Countryfile, RSPB. Award winning author, On Gallows Down & Ghosts of the Farm Climate Fic Prize Judge 2025 North Wessex. https://nicolachester.com/ https://linktr.ee/nicolachesterwriting
Weather Report: muggy, steamy; soft, intermittent, warm rain. A carousel of house martins winding south & west, swallows hawking insects low, then lower over the fields. A brief, wild, painterly sunset. Rooks gathering. Emotional Weather: unsourced Sunday wobbles, allayed with comfort pudding.
Before we get lost in new weather, I wanted to set it all down, this summer of 2026. New piece for An Ecology of Love & Ruin. nicolawriting.substack.com/p/an-ecology...
Weather Report: elegiac light & clouds over Wiltshire. To Salisbury via the villages, downs & The Plain. So beautiful it made my heart ache. An exhibition I’d longed to see, a cathedral spire that takes your breath away, 27yrs married to this loveliest man. Emotional Weather: loving, loved.
Weather Report: cooler, clouds the colour of sloes. A light rug on the horse at night & hay & straw in. A tonic of a catch up with a friend. An almost-murmuration of the farm’s starlings, raised in the eaves of our old cottage. A grey wagtail around the water buckets. Emotional Weather: contented
Weather Report: cooler, clouds the colour of sloes. A light rug on the horse at night & hay & straw in. A tonic of a catch up with a friend. An almost-murmuration of the farm’s starlings, raised in the eaves of our old cottage. A grey wagtail around the water buckets. Emotional Weather: contented
Next Tuesday @realfarmed.bsky.social!
Nicola Chester@nicolawriting.bsky.social · 4w agoLooking forward to this event with Melissa Harrison & @jcniala.bsky.social @realfarmed.bsky.social Imagining Tomorrow’s Countryside #FutureRural @littletollerbooks.bsky.social & @cprecountryside.bsky.social @cpreoxfordshire.bsky.social
‘The people of vessels of every nation, whether in peace or war, are to be equally objects of this institution …’ — William Hillary, on founding the RNLI, 1824. Quoted in We Came By Sea by Horatio Clare, published by @littletollerbooks.bsky.social.
The Unhurried Reader 📚🦊🇺🇦🇬🇱@theunhurriedreader.bsky.social · 4d agoIt breaks my heart—and enrages my soul—that Peter Sparkes, the Chief Executive of the RNLI, has been forced to issue a statement in the face of vile abuse & threats against individual crew members and their families, for supposed acts of sheltering, aiding or abetting small boat migrants. 🧵1/5
1777: Fern-owls haunts Mrs. Snooke's orchard in the autumn.
Weather Report: close, muggy. A car, a train through the water meadows, a bus & a walk to red-brick Reading. A man waves from the canal, while pushing a lock gate. I wave back, but the train carries me on & he doesn’t receive my response. It is there, all the same. Emotional Weather: also close
Weather Report: the back of a front a banner-flag of cloud, clear skies. An evening, a morning on the height of the hill, as close to the sky, & a faithful migratory route, as a grounded person can get here. In the contrail of a White-Tailed Eagle’s pass*. Emotional Weather: on top of the world.
An update on those tantalisingly un ID’d birds… (Osprey seems most likely at the moment) but I bumped into my local birding group up there today, who’d just been told by 2 cyclists on the ridgeway, they’d seen a White Tailed Eagle going over, mobbed by buzzards!
Nicola Chester@nicolawriting.bsky.social · last wk.Just say I went up the hill before sunset on a whim, sans binoculars fgs, & saw 2 large raptors, sitting on low trees, quartering, then flying higher like terns or gulls or even short eared owls. Just say one was white underneath, dark on top with dark wing tips, the other more brown-streaked. 1/3
Masked men, blockading a port & roads, & apparently refusing to speak to anyone don’t get arrested. Climate protesters, after the summer we’ve had, chatty, non-threatening, visible & open, politely explaining their cause & reason are treated as terrorists. Where the hell are we going with this?
HOPE not hate@hopenothate.org.uk · last wk.🚨 BREAKING: Patriot Platform, a new far right group launched by Tommy Robinson’s right hand man Daniel Thomas (AKA Danny Tommo) has blockaded the port and several roads in Dover. The masked men are from subgroups of PP, including Sussex, Essex, and South East Patriots Here’s all you need to know.
Masked men, blockading a port & roads, & apparently refusing to speak to anyone don’t get arrested. Climate protesters, after the summer we’ve had, chatty, non-threatening, visible & open, politely explaining their cause & reason are treated as terrorists. Where the hell are we going with this?
HOPE not hate@hopenothate.org.uk · last wk.🚨 BREAKING: Patriot Platform, a new far right group launched by Tommy Robinson’s right hand man Daniel Thomas (AKA Danny Tommo) has blockaded the port and several roads in Dover. The masked men are from subgroups of PP, including Sussex, Essex, and South East Patriots Here’s all you need to know.
Just say I went up the hill before sunset on a whim, sans binoculars fgs, & saw 2 large raptors, sitting on low trees, quartering, then flying higher like terns or gulls or even short eared owls. Just say one was white underneath, dark on top with dark wing tips, the other more brown-streaked. 1/3
Well this spammy scammer brought me joy! Author Jonathan Foster (or IS it George Weinstein) missing the AI point: faint praise. Though I love the sign off ‘perkily’ & may adopt it with my earlier happy accident: ‘all beset, perkily, Nicola. And I DO want to know what the Cafe touches are. Don’t I?
Weather Report: muggy; a stirring, soupy wind. But the alchemy of grass & rain! Two photos of the same cow pasture days apart. The big hill & the long grass seem little altered by the first rain in the whole of summer. The bald, dry dust bowl of the cow field, enlivened. Emotional Weather: awed
Weather Report: warmer than expected. A ride on hard ground softened by early leaf fall, muffling the clop of hooves. A courteous bus driver, mild whiplash from a barking dog behind a hedge, & beech leaf snacks. Talk is, the swallows have gone, haven’t they? Emotional Weather: nicely tired.
Weather Report: warmer than expected. A ride on hard ground softened by early leaf fall, muffling the clop of hooves. A courteous bus driver, mild whiplash from a barking dog behind a hedge, & beech leaf snacks. Talk is, the swallows have gone, haven’t they? Emotional Weather: nicely tired.
From Ravilious’s White Horse on fire, smoke among Avebury’s ancient stones & drought-stricken trees, to rain after a whole summer without (& the surprising smells it animates… sheep urine if you’re asking) my @theguardian.com Country Diary today.
Country diary: The rain has come, and suddenly the land looks (and smells) different | Nicola Chester
Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do
theguardian.com
& rain steady, humidity treetop height & rosebay bowed with small, cold lamps (tyreshush from the main drag washes uphill & you turn often to check behind you in the lane) - broken gutter of the pigeons' gappy barn gurgles & spills, uphill all is distant & introvert
'suddenly the land looks and smells different' it also sounds different to me — more birdsong. I'm so relieved, as it felt like we were under siege much to be done I started reading this before realising it was by @nicolawriting.bsky.social and then the penny slowly dropped... of course it is
Country diary: The rain has come, and suddenly the land looks (and smells) different | Nicola Chester
Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do
theguardian.com
From Ravilious’s White Horse on fire, smoke among Avebury’s ancient stones & drought-stricken trees, to rain after a whole summer without (& the surprising smells it animates… sheep urine if you’re asking) my @theguardian.com Country Diary today.
Country diary: The rain has come, and suddenly the land looks (and smells) different | Nicola Chester
Inkpen, Berkshire: From lurid yellow to a moorland brown; from the scent of fire smoke to sheep urine. It’s amazing what some rainfall can do
theguardian.com
Weather Report: a dampening, a sharpening. The season shifts a hip, pricks its ears in a new direction; something fresher this way comes. Goodbye to summer & a heat exhaustion, but though September is waiting in the wings, it’s not yet the season we know. Emotional Weather: well intentioned.
Weather Report: a dampening, a sharpening. The season shifts a hip, pricks its ears in a new direction; something fresher this way comes. Goodbye to summer & a heat exhaustion, but though September is waiting in the wings, it’s not yet the season we know. Emotional Weather: well intentioned.
The herd, in album cover pose, in a a pause from being wild.
