And Who?
There is a saying, or perhaps I just made it up, that "You can take the man out of Yorkshire, but you can't take Yorkshire out of the man." I am an expatriate, born and drug up in Yorkshire, so I suppose I am prejudiced -- it was God's own country before Australia was discovered and they appropriated the term "Godzone" and before Texas was invented.

In the beginning . . .
The Walk was first suggested by Bill Cowley, who farmed at Potto Hill, near its start and within sight of the Cleveland Hills, which it traverses. Bill Cowley wrote a piece in The Dalesman in August 1955 on the prospect of walking 40 miles across the untracked heather with only sheep and grouse for company. He issued a challenge to anyone who could cross from Scarth Wood Moor, the most westerly point of the Cleveland range near the village of Osmotherley, to Wyke Point at Ravenscar, the most easterly point where the Cleveland Hills fall to the sea.

Conditions now are much easier, though there can still be a certain feeling of dread when starting the Walk, often before dawn, in darkness and not fully-awake. Indeed Bill Cowley himself wrote that "A solemn silence should always prevail on the Lyke Wake Walk." This often is the case as hopeful Lyke Wakers stumble off into the dark. With dawn, parties are found climbing up onto Cringle Moor to start the crossing of what is still one of the wildest stretches of moor in Yorkshire.

Johnny, whose Lyke Wake Club title should really be Unholy Unit Undertaker (large parties a speciallity), told me about the first time he attempted a Lyke Wake crossing: "I was still a student at the Northumberland College of Education. This was not any old college, indeed it was not old at all. We were its first intake. I tell you that because we were treading in nobody's footsteps. We formed the Rambling Club, pulled on our boots and set off on the nearest big challenge. The Lyke Wake was it.

"We had borrowed a decrepit minibus from a nearby college; as usual I was the driver, having the only driving licence between the lot of us, and we were off to Osmotherley to start the Walk at 3:00a.m. This was always my preferred start time because to walk into the dawn meant that you stood a reasonable chance of finishing by sunset. If you don't finish by sunset the chances are you won't finish at all. On this occasion, for the first and only time, I was not the leader that honour belonging to one Mike Alport, a local lad, so to speak, as he came from Redcar.

"Starting at three meant that we hit Osmotherley just before closing time and we visited the fish & chip shop and the three pubs in the village square. After that it would be far too late to think about putting up tents, which was just as well, because Right-of-Way does not mean Right-to-Camp, and who wants to spend time walking away from the start to find a camp site? No, we laid down on a mattress of heather and looked up at the black velvet of the night sky, trying to kid each other that we really were asleep. Came three a.m. and were trying to kick-start the sleeping dead into some semblance of life for what was meant to be a fast climb up the scarp edge of the Cleveland Hills to find breakfast from our support team some three hours later at Hasty Bank.

"We shambled off, warming to our task, gaining altitude and seeing the lights of the villages spread out towards the artificial sodium glow over Greater Teesside. Walking quickly northward, the flush of the real dawn came flooding down from the east, spreading and exaggerating the black holes in the dry stone walls as they tumbled down over the edge of the moor, and increasing the contrast between the silhouetted pine trees and the ever-lightening pink-tinged sky. This was exhilarating stuff and my most powerful abiding memory from all my memories of nearly two dozen crossings."

The names of the places or features ahead on the Walk add to its magical, mysterious nature: Scugdale, Chop Yat, Botton Head and Bloworth; Flat Howe, Loose Howe, Shunner Howe, Simon Howe; Glaisdale, Wheeldale, Howe Moor, Urra Moor, Tom Cross Rigg and Snod Hill; Old Ralph Cross, Young Ralph Cross, Fat Betty, The Blue Man-i'-th'-Moss.

"To tell you of the Walk in detail would take nearly as long as to do it," Johnny told me and he went on to say that the support teams are often as anxious that "their" walkers appear on schedule as the walkers are to finish the Walk. "Several years after that first crossing, much, much later in the day and about 37 miles on into the Walk, we had three miles to go. This time I was the leader and so had complete responsibility for all the souls in the group, Venture Scouts to a man -- well, gangling youth anyway. The group were high on bravado but woefully short of long distance walking experience and, to say the least of it, they were feeling the worse for wear.

"The support party had walked down the track to meet us. Even the more far-gone members of the group believed that they really were going to make it now, as the lights of the support vehicles blazed out in front of us. One member of the support party, Jamie, had driven straight up from Peterborough for the finish and not seen our progressive decline into our present unspirited, black, ghoulish state as we had grown ever more weary of progressively declining into the bogs. Jamie was besides himself, he could not get over our state -- pointing at us and shaking with laughter. But he too looked an incongruous figure, still dressed in his office suit with his sharp Italian-style shoes, leaping about in the gloom, jumping over the heather tussocks mocking us.

"It seemed a good idea to get shot of him, so I sent him packing to switch off the headlights of the lead vehicle which was now dazzling us as we shuffled our way up the final hundred yards. Jamie ran off down the track and must have been dazzled too, because he fell headlong into the foulest cesspit imaginable.

"Even the un-dead managed a wry smile."

Now that landmark has gone too -- along with the perceived threat. The Golf Balls have been demolished and in their place a truncated pyramid erected. Complete in all but the top pointy bit, this structure too is huge, but being a dirty brown colour, blends into the landscape a little better than the three gleaming white Golf Balls. There is a theory that if the "Pyramid" had its top, it would be permanently surrounded by Druids, Seekers-After-Truth and associated loonies, so perhaps this is evidence of Military Foresight, if not intelligence.

With Fylingdales passed, the trek is nearly finished, yet it can still seem to take many hours before Lyke Wake Walkers can hear the sea (by the time they reach it, it is probably too dark to see it.) Time for a pint (or several), a rest and a reflection on the day's achievement.

Johhny told me about the strange case of Fylingdales' landmarks: "We were walking in the mid-afternoon from Ravenscar, doing the crossing widershins as far as I am concerned. I have only ever crossed from west to east three times and I don't like it, it is against the natural order of things. In those days there was no ever-deepening rut to follow. It really was a matter of navigating by compass on what seemed like virgin heather from howe to howe across the moor. Our next objective was Lilla Howe, it was foggy and things don't get much spookier. I took the bearing from the map, spaced out the party in a straight line abreast, with at least three people checking the bearing to keep us on a true heading. We came hard up against a barbed wire fence that I knew could only be the perimeter fence of Fylingdales Early Warning Station. I knew I must have made a mistake, but I couldn't think how. I knew the howe did not lie beyond the fence, so there was nothing to do but walk round to right, following rising ground. At last the craggy outline of the cross on its low rise loomed out of the mist. Whilst the others were recovering I was poking about and found a plaque I had never seen before. It said that the howe and the cross surmounting it had been removed from the Fylingdales site by the Army. They had re-sited it here when the Early Warning Station had been built. My navigation had been spot on, but my "target" on the map had been moved!

"The Ordnance Survey Map still shows Lilla Howe as being in its original location. Now the cold war has ended the Early Warning Station is drastically altered and the "Golf Balls" are no more. They intruded on the skyline for over a quarter of a century and the other souls that watch over the moor must look forward to the return of their former isolation. Should satellite technology allow the compete removal of the present aerial in its pyramid, the status of the National Park will protect it from future violation -- well that's the theory. I wonder if they will ever put Lilla Howe and its cross back in its rightful home? How many other poor lost souls have been lured away in the fog? I can just hear the long dead incumbents of the howe laughing in the wind as it buffets against the pile of stones that now marks their passing."

LWW

I came like some Gulliver,
Expecting to stride through the night, through seas of heather,
Across the whale backs of the Cleveland Hills.

To break the dawn on the railway, above Farndale
Bending like all else against the wind,
Questioning the skyline for the outline of Ralph's Cross

I know I will loose my temper with the "Blue Man i'-th'-Moss"
His blue stone heart has laughed at me before,
As I thrashed and wallowed in his mire, feeling him
Seeking and sucking me down.
My footsteps closing behind me.

Across Wheeldale to see in the distance
The idiotic structures so beloved of modern man,
Space-age like, their improbable shapes made to give us warning
Of war games played thousands of miles and centuries away.
And they never seem to get any nearer....

At last, past Lilla Cross, old friend of time travellers.
Only now we think we have won. The beacon is in sight,
But hidden in the evening Jugger Beck awaits
And relishes the penalty it will wreck on body and soul.

But who is the victor? True I have mastered the day.
Yet the moor remains silent.
The bottles, the litter, the ever-deepening rut
May mislead us into thinking it is acquiescent
To the army that passes, but does not conquer.

It bides its time, 'til Arctic gales scream across its wastes,
And then when all traces of man have been obliterated,
I know again, that the last time and the times before,
Were only rehearsals for the time when....
The moor will win.

.... An' Christ tak up thy saul....

Johnny Walker, June 1977

The situation became so bad that parties were asked not to attempt the Walk because of the increasing threat of erosion. However, I always feel ambivalent towards such supposed "overuse" of the countryside and to similar challenge walks in England -- the Yorkshire Three Peaks and the Pennine Way, for example:

• They can introduce people to the pleasures (?) of Long Distance Walking in a reasonably safe, well-populated environment.
• Ten thousand footprints do not leave as indelible a mark as ten yards of tarmac.
• Hundreds of people concentrated on the Lyke Wake Walk leave hundreds of square miles of empty moorland for those that like it.
• In the long term, the land recovers. Part of the route of the Walk is along a disused railway track which now looks like a path in a park.

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