Description: Now a book that tells the story of an environmental protest that changed history.
A personal story
May is one of the loveliest months, the promise of summer very real now and weeks of it still to come. It is a good time for falling in love, serenaded by bird song and surrounded by hawthorn blossom and buttercups. Perhaps that is one reason why I fell so deeply in love with Twyford Down on a May afternoon thirty years ago next week.
Those were the early days of the protest – before people went to prison, before the great cutting through the chalk hill was begun in earnest. I’d seen a poster somewhere for a rally on the Down – it was probably hand-drawn in pen and photocopied – a reliable means of spreading news in the days before the internet. With a couple of friends I’d walked out of Winchester, followed the river and the slow waters of the canal, stepped under the old brick tunnel that ran beneath the Winchester bypass and out into