The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [103]
The report concluded that numbers doing the walk must be reduced by half, at the very least. The Lyke Wake Club tried to do its bit by creating alternative routes, the Shepherd’s Round and the Hambleton Hobble, but they never really caught on, for people had bought into the myth of the Lyke Wake that the Club had so assiduously nursed and weren’t prepared to be fobbed off with sloppy seconds. Ordnance Survey were told to take the route off their maps, which they duly did. TV crews were turned away. Charity teams were discouraged, while those from the police, army and cadet forces – a significant proportion of the total – were firmly told to go elsewhere and find other challenges. Even Bill Cowley acknowledged the necessity for action, saying, ‘I feel very sad that it has come to this, but it is the only way.’ And it worked: almost instantly, the number of Lyke Wakers plummeted.
After the drastic cull of 1982, numbers started to rise again, and when, a decade later, the National Park Authority set up another working party to discourage overuse of the route, one of the most vociferous of the Lyke Wake Club’s officials fired off a tetchy letter to the Darlington and Stockton Times. In it, he told of an American tourist who’d written to the National Park to ask about the Lyke Wake Walk. The officer who’d replied had told him that it wasn’t on official rights of way and that ‘permission should really be obtained from the landowners.’ He then went on to criticise the creeping mentality of council-approved waymarked routes, writing ‘for some reason, the vast majority of walkers seem to be unable to place one leg in front of the other unless the route has a fancy name, badge and completion certificate’ – a very good point indeed, until you remember that it was the Lyke Wake Club that pioneered such things, and were still enthusiastically marketing them.
Cowley died in 1994, aged 78. While his steady hand was on the tiller, there was still – just about – a sense that the Lyke Wake Walk was little more than boyish high jinks that had got slightly out of control. Some of his lieutenants, though, didn’t seem to share his easy-going sense of perspective, and furiously guarded everything about both the walk and the club. This came to a head as the 50th anniversary of the first crossing loomed in 2005, when a tight cabal of ‘senior members’ decided to call it a day and kill the club. A splinter group vehemently disagreed, and decided to launch themselves as the New Lyke Wake Walk Club. This was inaugurated at a dinner in the Queen Catherine Inn in Osmotherley on the first of October 2005, precisely 50 years since Bill Cowley’s first walk. Forty-two miles away on the very same night, at the Raven Hall Hotel in Ravenscar, the old Lyke Wake Club held its final Wake and disappeared from the map. Not entirely, though, for the commercial trading arm, purveyors of all that coffin-shaped tat, the ‘fancy name, badge and completion certificate’, plus a whole load more, continued and still trades today.
It was not an amicable divorce. The new group was regularly characterised by the old as being full of southern softies who didn’t understand the highly autarkic culture of the North York Moors. The ghost of Bill Cowley was regularly invoked in the spat, with both sides contending that they were acting as he would have wished them to. Claims and counter-claims streamed through the local papers and rambling magazines. Although hostilities have largely ceased now, and a few hundred people continue to tramp the route each year, there’s still an acrimonious whiff hanging over the Lyke Wake Walk – worse even than the diabolical sulphur of an Irish dance hall or Father Fahey’s incinerated clutch. Never has the Lyke Wake Walk’s mournful iconography looked more pathetically appropriate.
Chapter 8
WHERE DIRT MEETS WATER
Up the Brum: the Birmingham Main Line Canal,