| Pages: | 224 pages |
| Size: | 6 x 9 inch |
| Publisher: | Chelsea Green Publishing UK |
| Pub. Date: | September 30, 2025 |
| ISBN: | 9781915294678 |
Ghosts of the Farm
Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community
Hardcover
$28.00
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.
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.
Reviews & Praise
Guy Shrubsole, author of The Lost Rainforests of Britain
‘This is a rich and riveting book, and I didn’t want it to end. Interweaving the fascinating story of a woman farmer in the Second World War with the author’s own story as she attempts to advocate for a nature-depleted countryside, it’s a gentle battle cry – heartwarming, melancholy and vital.’
Lissa Evans, author of Small Bomb at Dimperley
‘A wonderfully evocative account of a fascinating and until now untold story, uniting two women’s passion for farming and the English countryside.’
Stephen Moss, author of Ten Birds That Changed the World
‘Nicola’s evocation of Miss White truly haunts me. Energetic, enigmatic and with one foot poised over a chasm of change, Ghosts of the Farm brings joy and thoughtfulness, litanies of horses’ names and Land Girls hoeing in their underwear. The woman farmer from wartime and the woman writer from the present, whose stories haunt this book, share a practicality, frustrations, hopes and fears for the future of the landscape they love.’
Alison Brackenbury, poet and broadcaster
‘This captivating dual-stranded memoir puts rural women firmly in their place: right at the heart of the farm. Nicola Chester and her indomitable predecessor Miss Julia White are unforgettable guides to a changed and changing countryside.’
Melissa Harrison, author of All Among the Barley
‘Nicola Chester will come to be seen as a Nan Shepherd of our time. She knows the land, and its lives, with a knowing that can only come from a million barefoot steps across it. She loves the land with a tenacity that stems only from having fought and cried hot tears for it. And she writes with a clarity that aches on the page. Ghosts of the Farm is devastatingly good. Hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck good.’
Nick Acheson, author of The Meaning of Geese
‘No one, but no one, writes like Nicola Chester. Her blend of grit, sensitivity, integrity, wisdom and artistry is unique. Ghosts of the Farm is a clear-eyed view of the social and ecological thinning of English rural life, but it’s also a breath of oxygen to its resilient embers of sustainability and equitability. A bittersweet and timely tonic for the soul of British farming.’
Amy-Jane Beer, author of The Flow
‘A heartening, haunted and beautifully written book that is a powerful paean to rural life and working the land.’
Rob Cowen, author of The North Road
‘Through Nicola’s experiences, the heartbeats of ghosts are revived and woven into the present and future, reminding us that we are all rooted to the earth we share, live and eventually become. Nicola is a special writer: her words the tips of her consciousness and the core of her bones. Ghosts of the Farm transports me through time while inviting me to embrace every single moment and the wild and tame lives we share our territories with.’
Hannah Bourne-Taylor, author of Nature Needs You
‘Ghosts of the Farm is much more than a tale of two women struggling to become farmers while battling prejudice against their gender. Written in exquisite prose, it is a story celebrating the glory of the countryside and country living, a story of struggles and triumphs, in times of war and peace. I found myself rooting for both heroines.’
Rhys Bowen, internationally best-selling author of The Tuscan Child, The Venice Sketchbook and other historical novels, as well as the Royal Spyness and Molly Murphy mystery series
About Nicola Chester
Nicola Chester is the Award Winning author of On Gallows Down. She became one of the few female forerunners of 'the new nature writing' after winning the BBC Wildlife Magazine Nature Writer of the Year Award back in 2003. She is a Guardian Country Diarist and columnist for the RSPB and BBC Countryfile Magazine. An 'imperfect activist' for community, climate and nature, she also writes about rural matters, and her work appears in several other publications and anthologies, such as the Seasons books, edited by Melissa Harrison, and Women on Nature, edited by Katharine Norbury. Nicola is a contributor to the book Wild Service, edited by Nick Hayes and Jon Moses. Nicola is one of the judges of the inaugural Climate Fiction Prize, 2025 and a former School Librarian. She is a long-term tenant in a farmworkers’ cottage in the North Wessex Downs and her new book, Ghosts of the Farm, is due out Autumn 2025.
Books by Nicola Chester
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