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By Root 412 0

obvious that Bill Cowley had created a monster, and the backlash came quickly. In the hot summer of 1975, a fire on the heather-and-peat tinderbox of Wheeldale Moor burned for a fortnight. As always, blame was swiftly, and on no firm evidence, lain squarely at the feet of walkers; calls were made for the Lyke Wake Walk to be banned outright. Richard Hamersley, Land Surveyor to the Duchy of Lancaster, slyly pointed out that ‘the route of the walk is not a statutory footpath, and serious thought will have to be given as to the legitimacy of this activity.’ He was being slightly disingenuous, for around half of the path was on recognised rights of way, the remainder, mostly in the eastern section, on well-worn (and well-mapped) permissive tracks that had been used since anyone could remember. In Hamersley’s mind, there was no doubt who was to blame for the fire: ‘This week I collected no fewer than 69 cigarette ends in a half-mile random stretch of the route. If this is indicative of the whole length, there must be some 5,600 cigarette ends recently smoked along the walk. No wonder that during the recent dry weather a fire of this magnitude has occurred.’ The following summer, 1976, was hotter and drier still, and an agreement was reluctantly brokered to suspend the walk for the duration of the drought.

The first winds of trouble only made the Lyke Wake Club retreat further into its pound-shop Hallowe’en grotto. They put a proposal to the Countryside Commission that the route should be recognised as an official Long Distance Path (LDP), which was immediately rejected. Never mind, for it gave ample chance for the polishing of Yorkshire chips on square shoulders: the Chief Dirger himself denouncing the decision, and stating that it ‘reflects the typical Southern, bureaucratic attitude of people who would not recognize a walk if they saw one’. In fact, the Countryside Council had already plotted an alternative walk, the Cleveland Way, over much of the same ground, combining it with a final coastal flourish from Whitby to Filey. After the Pennine Way, this had been Britain’s second official LDP, opening in 1969. But that was dull and square, man, authority’s preferred route and not for the self-styled swashbuckling dirgers and witches of the Lyke Wake.

As now happens with Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk (which shares some of the route, and much of the spirit, of the Lyke Wake), the lack of official recognition only seemed to make it even more attractive to some. Numbers continued to grow, peaking at the tail end of the 1970s. The walk was barely off the box, and it became by far the number one charity challenge in the country. It was these that killed the Lyke Wake more than anything, for they were often huge groups, walking five or six abreast, prompting a member of the local National Park Committee to say that ‘twenty years ago, the Lyke Wake Walk was just a sheeptrack. Now it is wide enough for two tanks to cross side by side.’ Worse, every charity-sponsored walk came complete with a sophisticated back-up support system of refreshment and medical teams, to be found bouncing around unfamiliar moorland lanes in minibuses all through the night. Increasingly often, an ambulance would have to join the throng. Sensing only a thin scatter of population, many walkers – already fired up with the shouty sanctimony of doing it all for charity – were oblivious to their devastating impact on the taciturn local community.

In May 1982, the North York Moors National Park, never the most radical of organisations, set up a Lyke Wake Walk Working Party to investigate what should be done. The remit of the group was clear and stated at the outset, that ‘it is stressed that if a substantial reduction in use [of the Walk] is not achieved, the National Park Committee will have to consider complete closure.’ Dr Roy Brown of the National Park heaped up the hyperbole: ‘Within a few years the whole area will be a desert if something is not done quickly.’ This is an interesting one, for while the track was undoubtedly eroding quite markedly in places,