The Lyke Wake Walk on a 1976 map, before Ordnance Survey was ordered to remove it |
(an edited extract from my book The Wild Rover, 2011)
The northern equivalent of the word lich is lyke, and
reading that, a distant recollection 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 a 1957 Yorkshire
Himalayan Expedition and, since returning to farm his native patch, was active
in the Yorkshire Dialect Society. No prizes for guessing what he would have picked as his specialist subject if he'd ever made it on to Mastermind.
At noon on
the first of October 1955, Cowley and twelve 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 eleven 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 log books of the walk, which were kept in cafes at
either end for people to sign in their times and experiences, are full of
entries by groups from places 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 feature 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 log book that they “did not take magnetic
variation into account – ended up in Middlesbrough”.
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 log book.
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. 191 did it in the first three years, and then
the numbers started to climb quite markedly: 112 in 1959 alone, 255 in 1960 and
790 in 1961. Over ninety percent 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.
© Guardian |
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, 3141 people completed the route, including 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 two hundred, 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.
And 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 forty 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
cuff-links, 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
seventies 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 progrock 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 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 disingenuous,
for much of the path was on recognised rights of way, the remainder, mostly in
the eastern half, on well-worn 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
poundshop 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 seventies. 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 Yorkshire 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, is this not exactly how
our much-loved ancient holloways and green lanes were initially created? We wouldn’t have much to coo over now if our
ancestors had been quite so squeamish.
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 was told to take the route off its 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 Walk 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 fiftieth 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 fifty 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; never has its mournful
iconography looked more pathetically appropriate.