The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths

by Mike Parker

  We’d woken the farm dogs up, though. Howling and hollering, they were down in a dip from where a solitary light glowed. It was after one in the morning, and there was nothing we could do but march down there and hope that Woody’s protection against the folk of the spiritual realm would work too on the creatures of the distinctly physical one. By the time we reached the farm yard, the noise was tumultuous. A light snapped on in an upstairs window of the farmhouse, and a woman threw open the glass.

  ‘Who’s there?’ she shrieked. The dogs went even crazier at the tone of her voice. We transmogrified in an instant from pagan subversives into the nicest middle-class boys you’d ever introduce to your mum.

  ‘Oh, hello there,’ said Woody, all but doffing his hat. ‘Really sorry to disturb you, gosh it’s late, but we got, er, well, we got a bit lost on the moor. Sorry.’

  Silence. I mumbled a sorry or two in support.

  ‘Er, could you possibly point us in the direction of Peter Tavy?’ Not a strapping local who’d come and rescue us, but the name of the nearest village gleaned from the map.

  ‘Down that lane. Keep going.’

  The window crashed shut on yet more apologies from us, setting the dogs off again. We ran from the farm yard.

  The last bit of the walk, along satisfyingly solid country lanes under a canopy of stars, was beautiful. Even the moon was finally getting its act together by rising high enough into the sky to help us see. There was the small problem that my car was still five or six miles away, and there was no way Woody, whose feet were in agony from knackered boots, could walk that far. We decided that, as soon as one of us had a phone signal, we’d try and find a taxi to take us back to the car.

  We shape-shifted for the second time in an hour when the taxi from Tavistock finally caught up with us back on the main A386. Having gone from nomadic rebels to impeccable Cedrics at the farm, we further metamorphosed into swooning Edwardian ladies in the company of the chatty taxi driver. ‘You’re our knight in shining armour!’ we trilled, which he seemed to rather like. He was entirely unfazed to be picking up two idiots who’d ‘got a bit lost on the moor’ at two in the morning: ‘Seen it all in this job,’ he said, grinning at us. He told us of folk in T-shirts and flip-flops who ask to be dropped in the middle of the moor ‘’cos they fancy a walk’. ‘Not in that outfit, I won’t,’ is his standard, schoolmarmish reply. How the Edwardian ladies tittered!

  Actually, we were probably near clinical hysteria. It had been the most trying walk I think I’ve ever done, and that was on a warm summer’s evening carrying nothing more than a map, some water and a few Kit Kats. I tried to imagine what dragging a 15-stone corpse the same way would have been like, on a howling winter’s day perhaps. Strung from a bier, the sack of dead flesh swinging in the wind as your back ached and feet froze in the gloop. Perhaps some people used a cart, and spent large parts of the awful journey alternately tugging the wheels out of the hungry mud and bouncing them over sharp rocks. People must have died making that journey. Would church rules, condemning people to this torture for no good reason save for their own sense of divine right, allow that the new body be let in to the graveyard with the old? Or would the poor, broken bastards be forced to do it all again next week?

  Not much better than the idiots in flip-flops, I had seriously underestimated the moor. It had seemed impossible that somewhere so savage could sit at the heart of Devon, that lush landscape of cattle and clotted cream. Snobbery played an inglorious part too: my devotion to Wales, taken to new heights (and depths) from a decade of living there, had produced a sour little assumption that there was nowhere truly wild left in England. England’s little piskies had the last laugh on that one.

  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 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 hooked on it, and on 9 July 1961 did the route in 6 hours, 39 minutes and 20 seconds. ‘NEW RECORD (Beat this!)’ he inscribed proudly. Cowley added a gruff note: ‘Can’t accept seconds – agreed at 6.40.’

  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. A
ny 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 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, 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 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.