The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [101]
At the end of every year, Cowley would tot up the number of walkers who had completed the route and scribe the result into the logbook. Keeping to the funereal theme, he called himself the Chief Dirger, and granted titles such as ‘Anxious Almoner’ to his closest acolytes. Any man who completed the challenge in the requisite time could apply to become a fellow dirger, and to receive a black-edged ‘condolence card’ to prove it at a shilling a pop. In the first three years, 191 did it and then the numbers started to climb quite markedly: 112 in 1959 alone, 255 in 1960 and 790 in 1961. Well over 90 per cent of them were men. Women who’d completed the trek weren’t granted dirger status, and were simply called ‘witches’ instead.
There was a breezy levity to those early days. Bill Cowley himself did the route numerous times, including on skis during the Arctic winter of 1962–3. He sounded at his most spirited recording a trek in November 1961, when he and regular fellow dirger Campbell Bosanquet left Osmotherley just after midnight, arriving in Ravenscar at 2.40 the following afternoon, in time to catch the 3.16 train back for an evening cocktail party. En route, he records, they’d enjoyed ham sandwiches and coffee at 3.30 a.m., sausages and mushrooms at 8.15, ‘a pint of iced nectar at Beck Hole’ at 10.45 and ‘another at the Flask (not quite so iced)’ at 1.40. It was all a bit of overgrown schoolboy fun, but that couldn’t last.
A month before this crossing, the Lyke Wake Walk had been featured for the first time on television, when a crew from the BBC programme Tonight came to film it. Over the next decade or so, other TV crews, journalists and writers followed, and soon the Lyke Wake Walk was a national legend. Numbers swelled exponentially, peaking in the lighter months of May and June. In June 1975 alone, 3,141 people completed the route, including Hungarian-born Louis Kulcsar of Stockton-on-Tees, for whom it was the 110th crossing (three of which were barefoot). He’s still doing it, and has now racked up around 200, the official record. It’s believed that 1978 was the peak year, when anything between twenty and thirty thousand completed the walk, the vast majority of them going west–east from Osmotherley, and most of them starting in the dead of night. The muttering of discontented locals, furious at being woken up almost nightly by excitable gangs of soldiers, scouts and Rotarians, became an inconsolable roar.
As the popularity of the walk grew, so did the hoodoo surrounding it. Despite there being no evidence whatsoever that this had indeed ever been used as a coffin path (and it seems unlikely that any funeral procession would carry the dead over 40 miles), Bill Cowley’s imaginative take on history was given as hard fact, and repeated mantra-like across books, newspapers, radio and television. Merchandise, such as coffin-shaped cufflinks, ties and headscarves for the ‘witches’, flew off the shelves. Regular gatherings were called ‘Wakes’, with suitably morbid entertainment laid on. The highest accolade, allowing you to wear purple robes at Wakes, was as a ‘Doctor of Dolefulness’: to qualify, you had to have done at least seven crossings, one of which needed to be in the winter and one a solo unsupported trek, meaning no teams of thermos-bearing car drivers to meet you at appointed halts. Photos of the Wakes in the 1970s show a curious mix of grizzled Yorkshire farmers, a few bald bank managers taking a walk on the wild side, some wiry fell runners and a generous sprinkling of bearded prog-rock pagans getting quietly wassocked on real ale. These took place against a backdrop of black candles, coffin-shaped menu cards and skull-painted drapes. With its coterie of hardcore fanatics and pedants, its pages of tightly held rules and invented customs, the Lyke Wake Club started to look distinctly cultish.
It was increasingly