The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (26 page)

As the sun slid down in a sultry haze, the temperature barely dropped at all. I was sweltering, the sweat dripping off my nose as we pushed on down into a valley and back up again to the next tor. This was the pattern for miles: you never reach any momentous height, but the constant up and down, through wiry grass and sudden pools of rusty water, was absolutely knackering. The day’s over-consumption of fags was also weighing heavy on us both.

My God, but it was impressive. We sat on one tor, having a bit of food and drink, as the sun sank towards the north-west. Ten minutes before it disappeared, I looked around to the opposite horizon, and there was the freshly risen full moon, briefly the sun’s identical twin. Both were pink and hazy, squashed at the extremities, one leaving, one arriving, and sharing just the most fleeting moment of perfect synchronicity. We sighed, smiled and felt very blessed, enough even to stop feeling scared for a few minutes.

Paul Devereux wasn’t wrong, though. The path was a sod to follow, especially in dwindling light. Even the moon wasn’t playing ball. Having risen so spectacularly, it failed to climb high and bright, preferring instead to limp along just above the horizon, the colour of ripe cheese. At times, there was no evidence of a route at all, and all we could do was work out from the map what we were vaguely aiming for and to head as best as possible in that direction. I’m ashamed to say that I hadn’t even brought a compass. Though I had remembered my little wind-up torch, and was feeling pretty pleased with myself for that. All the same, we were breaking the cardinal rule of not straying from the corpse road, and I couldn’t imagine that it had ever been any different for anyone else.

Occasionally, we would stumble across the Lich Way again, whether as a gravel or grass path, a rough stone cobble, or as a sudden and unexpected little holloway through the featureless sump. It was as clear as day when we were back on the path, you could just feel it. As I found on the Tóchar Phádraig, there was an echoing, bony quality to it, the sound of centuries of human and animal feet booming deep and resonant beneath us. It swam in and out of focus like a distant radio signal, but when it was on, it was very on. And when it was off, we floundered hopelessly. The folk, I was told, were largely leaving us alone. They had long ago surrendered authority on this ribbon of humanity across their moor, for this, Woody felt, had been a human ceremonial way long before the Church muscled in.

He did confess an encounter later on, though, one that I’m very glad he didn’t divulge at the time. At one of the bleakest bits in the middle of the moor, when we’d lost the route again and were inching like snails across the squelchy savannah, Woody tells me that the spirit of a dead man, big and hairy, wearing hessian, with mad eyes and a matted beard, suddenly appeared at our side. He wasn’t in a good mood either, forever denied the sanctuary of church on account of being a murderer and condemned to spend eternity on the Lich Way. ‘You can take me out with you,’ he told Woody, who pointed out that he couldn’t, as he was protected. ‘He’s not, though,’ said the hirsute murderer, pointing at me, at which point Woody silently threw some protection my way.

Something got through, however, because as we became increasingly lost, and the moon continued to glimmer dimly only just above the horizon, I began to feel really ill. I’d massively overheated earlier, and that nearly always brings on a migraine. And so it was again. It felt as if the jolt of every step were bruising my eyeballs from the inside, and I could barely focus. The map under torchlight swam uselessly in my gaze, all identifying landscape features invisible in the black. I had to stop; the pain was excruciating.

Often, a physical purge helps release the pressure a little, and I was soon retching into the black. My head still pounded, and all I could think of to do was to place it, forehead-first, on the cool grass, and hope that it would absorb some of the heat and pain. Woody later told me that this moment, as I sank to the ground with a moan, was his low-point of the night (amongst some pretty stiff competition), as he wasn’t too sure that I’d ever get up again. He put his hands on my head and declared that there was a flint from the folk lodged in my forehead; I’d been attacked. He helped dispel it, and I felt a little better, just about able to continue on our hopeless way.

A long drawn-out hour or two later, the remains of the headache vanished in an instant, at the precise moment when we scrambled over a dry stone wall into a farmer’s field. Even if we were miles out of our way (and we were), we had reached the other side of the moor. Relief flooded my body, and the pain just evaporated. I have never had such a strong, and instant, physical recovery from so far down. The dry stone wall, and even the barbed wire that topped it, were the first workings of the hand of man that we’d seen in hours, and they looked just wonderful.

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. 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.