Ghosts of the Farm: Two Women’s Journeys Through Time, Land and Community

Shortlisted for the 2025 Richard Jefferies Award

A Book of the Year 2025 — The Spectator

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.

“An absolutely fascinating insight into women and farming. Nicola Chester really knows how to bring the past alive.”—Claire Fuller, author of The Memory of Animals