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<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\u201cI\u2019ve always described myself as a \u2018country girl\u2019 but, increasingly, I wonder what that means. Growing up on the rural edge of small towns or villages, it was a defining, fierce and helpful moniker. It symbolised certain things about me I wanted to show or be \u2013 a kind of \u201cbut I belong out there\u201d. <\/p>\n\n
Specifically though, for me, it meant I was someone immersed in nature, who \u2018understood\u2019 and wanted to know things. From my childhood bedroom-carpet model farm, to the pony books and rural novels I read endlessly, the working, rural life was everything. This only deepened in adulthood, working with horses, on a farm, for a conservation charity, and campaigning, protesting for and writing about nature. I married a \u2018countryman\u2019 and we raised our three children in a sequence of tied or tenanted farm cottages, in various stages of benign neglect. <\/p>\n\n
As well as writing about wildlife and nature now, I also work in a small rural secondary school, where children are bussed in from the villages and are just as likely to be farm workers\u2019, grooms\u2019 or gamekeepers\u2019 kids, as they are of employees of cutting-edge global business. It often seems that this high-chalk country \u2013 of soaring swallow-flight curves and combes, of curry-combed corduroy fields and ancient woodland and monuments to the first farmers of the area \u2013 is a delicious and wry conundrum. It is also home to high-tech \u2018big ag\u2019, vast pheasant shoots and large country estates owned by investors. Welcome to the breathtaking North Wessex Downs AONB; particularly, my remote-seeming rural corner, set in the kitten heel of the Berkshire \u2018shoe\u2019 on the border of Wiltshire and Hampshire, 70 miles from London.<\/span><\/p>\n\n This is a place where you can mistake a voice or figure from the past for the shape and picture of the wind, blowing like an oboe through a metal gate. I have a love for the past, but am wary of rose-tinted nostalgia. I love traditions, but tradition can be a coercive, exclusive thing, too. So we must listen with fresh ears and new insight. The countryside has always been about change and progress, even though it does so with a lacquer of timelessness. It is these conundrums, assumptions and associations that I\u2019m intending to explore in this column. I\u2019m still that country girl, but older and possibly wiser, I look at that label differently now. I am still utterly defined by nature, by the rural, but I am also defined by the loss and lack of it.<\/span><\/p>\n\n Nature isn\u2019t exclusive to the countryside and the countryside is not always a safe place for wildlife. Every plant, butterfly, small flock of farmland birds is a thrill, a joy, a celebration \u2013 and a heartbreaking remnant of what once was (and, because we must have hope and action, what could be again). The countryside is rich in culture and history, but lacks in cultural diversity and opportunity. We are sometimes removed from the work our farmers do, and access to knowledge and the land can be complex and discouraging. It is a privilege to live \u2018in the sticks\u2019 and yet, we go without many services and, at times, struggle. <\/p>\n\n So, yes, I am a countrywoman and in my columns I\u2019m looking forward to exploring what our beloved \u2018countryside\u2019 is, and what it means to us, as we adapt to the biggest changes we have ever faced. And we\u2019ll do it as best we can, with nature, the land and the country at our heels and in our hearts, wherever we are and wherever we are from.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Nicola Chester is a countryside writer. <\/p>\n\n Her first book, On Gallows Down<\/em>, is shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize for nature writing.<\/p>\n\nHOPE FOR THE FUTURE <\/strong><\/h5>\n\n
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