• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 308 0

detonated. The Lyke Wake Walk was a name I’d not heard in years, and it instantly brought back memories of Blue Peter presenters grunting and grimacing their way across the invariably sodden North York Moors. In the late 1970s, it had seemed that every scout pack, charity group, rambling society, Rotary Club and TV beefcake was stomping through the heather from Osmotherley to Ravenscar. This, we were always told, was far more than a mere walk; it was an endurance test, a challenge like no other, for to qualify for membership of the exclusive club of successful Lyke Wakers, you had to complete the 42-mile trek in under 24 hours, usually necessitating overnight walking. Even better, and even darker, it was overlain with a neo-pagan patina of ancient ritual, for this was said to be an old coffin path to the sea, passing as it does the odd Bronze Age burial mound and stone cross. Some groups even upped the ante by dressing as undertakers and carrying a coffin. In my early teens, it had been the biggest, most famous footpath in the land, yet it had all but disappeared. To paraphrase another great relic of the Age of Beige, whatever happened to the Lyke Wake Walk?

The walk, sometimes claimed to be the first named long-distance path in the country, began in modest circumstances in 1955. Bill Cowley, a farmer from Swainby, between Middlesbrough and Northallerton, had written a piece in that August’s edition of The Dalesman magazine laying down the challenge of walking across the moors to the sea in one day. The idea had come to him in a flash, he said, earlier that summer when he’d climbed to the top of Glaisdale Rigg, the ridge between Glaisdale and its splendidly named western neighbour, Fryupdale. From the lofty top, he’d suddenly imagined lines of the ancients trekking their way across the moor, from one weathered old cross, standing stone or ancient mound to the next. Cowley was an engaging and passionate Yorkshireman, always able to join the most insubstantial of dots into a seamless swagger of local pride. He’d gone to Cambridge, where he formed the Yorkshire Society, led the 1957 Yorkshire Himalayan Expedition and, since returning to farm his native patch, was active in the Yorkshire Dialect Society.

At noon on the first of October that year, Cowley and 12 others set off from Osmotherley and headed east, threading their way along sheep paths through the heather. The party camped at seven that evening at Hamer, and set off again at 3.30 a.m, reaching the coast at Ravenscar, midway between Scarborough and Whitby, at 11 o’clock the following morning. The Lyke Wake Walk, and its irresistible mystique, was born.

Word spread fast. In the early days, it was almost entirely local: the first logbooks of the walk, which were kept in cafés at either end for people to sign in their times and experiences, are full of entries by groups from bodies such as York Technical College, Middlesbrough GPO Telephones Division, a Stockton-on-Tees scout pack, the Apprentice Training Centre at ICI’s Wilton works, Selby Round Table and the Darlington Young Liberals. The unlikely sounding outfit of the East Yorkshire Mountaineering Club features a few times. The few southerners who took it on fared fairly dismally, none more guaranteed to make a Yorkshireman crack a thin smile than a party from the London Region of the Youth Hostel Association, who, in 1961, curtly confessed to the logbook that they ‘did not take magnetic variation into account – ended up in Middlesbrough’.

In the logbooks, the glowering presence of Bill Cowley looms over every entry. The first one started with a request to fill in ‘details of route, times, conditions and names of walkers on a separate full page for each attempt’. That was crossed out, and ‘CANCEL THIS!’ scrawled across in Cowley’s looping hand. He gave an arch explanation: ‘The Puckrin family are taking up too much space!’ Indeed, the first eight pages of the logbook are all Puckrins. In a foretaste of the obsessive tendencies that the Lyke Wake Walk stirred so massively later on, Arthur Puckrin in particular seemed