Queen's English Society Awards for Excellent English

extract from Angela's winning article in

Resurgence 237 August 2006 - Great Orton Nature Reserve

'I am visiting the new Watchtree Nature Reserve, which happens to be the mass grave of animals lost during the Foot and Mouth disease outbreak of 2001: 448,508 sheep, 12,085 cattle, and 5,719 pigs to be precise. Those memories of smoking pyres, that dreadful stink, piles of dead animals, friends and neighbours trapped on their farms for weeks, a lifetime’s work and livelihoods gone up in smoke….
Here, in a rough scrape in the broken concrete, is an oystercatcher’s nest. Three pale olive speckled eggs. The parents wheel and cry around us, that mournful cry which stirs the soul. The lightning zigzags on their wings show up against a darkening sky. They are waiting to return, to begin the process of nurturing new life. Here, somehow, there may be the beginnings of hope.'

The outright winner and the other five finalists were all journalists from the Daily Telegraph,Telegraph Weekend or Telegraph Magazine and John Cornwell ( Fourth Estate: A Seminary Boy: A Memoir).

The picture which accompanied the article is reproduced below by kind permission of Val Corbett, the photographer.