Get ready to ‘cross over’ on the Lyke Wake Walk,
Once Britain’s favourite single-day challenge hike, now a dark little secret. Welcome to the strange world of the Lyke Wake Walk…
IT’S 4.54AM. I’M in darkness on a hillside, crouching by a stone so my camera can capture both the time on my watch and the inscription on the stone. Forty miles east, there’s another stone with the same inscription. If I can reach it on foot by this time tomorrow, I will earn one of the strangest titles in the walking world. Between the two stones lie dramatic escarpments, immense tracts of heathery bog, dozens of ancient burial mounds, a combined 5000ft of ascent, and a very weird story.
The inscription says Lyke Wake Walk.
It’s now 5am. Start the clock.
5.11am Scarth Wood Moor (½ mile)
Still dark, nothing to see, so let’s fill in the backstory. The Lyke Wake Walk is a 40-mile hike across the width of the North York Moors National Park from Cod Beck Reservoir, just north of the village of Osmotherley, to the transmitter mast at Beacon Howes, just west of Ravenscar on the coast. The aim is to complete it within 24 hours, in order to earn the title of Witch (female) or Dirger (male) of the Way. Many fit walkers aim to do it in a lot less – 16-19 hours is a common goal.
There are only two waymarkers on the route. It’s not marked on OS maps, although Harvey Maps show it. Its western half shares common ground with both the Cleveland Way and the Coast to Coast. But it pre-dates both of them, and to the east, the Lyke Wake goes all by itself into the mire.
I’m walking it in mid-September, going from west to east because that’s the broadly agreed tradition. On the crest of the moor I join the Cleveland Way, which will be my companion for the next 13 miles to Bloworth Crossing, as will the Coast to Coast.
The next 13 miles. It sounds weird, talking about a distance that would normally be a long day’s walk as being just a fraction of what I’m actually hoping to do. On the Lyke Wake, distances become elastic. Within a few hours I’ll be measuring five-mile stretches the way I’d normally think of single miles.
It messes with my head.
6.30am Gold Hill (4½ miles)
Those initial miles consisted mainly of plantation tracks, so it didn’t matter that it was dark. Now, as dawn breaks, I’m climbing onto the scarp of the Cleveland Hills. From here to Bloworth, everything is going to be spectacular. And now I can actually see it. Yay!
8am The Wain Stones (9 miles)
The classic sights of the Cleveland Way have flown by: Carlton Bank, Lordstones, Cringle Moor. Now here are the Wain Stones, and my first sit-down pause. Visually, this is as impressive as the walk will get; this bastion of chaotic cracked crags, with their secret passages and beetling caps. Then onwards, towards Round Hill, which, at 1490ft (454m) is the highest point on the walk – and it’s where I catch my first glimpse of the sea ahead.
8.53am Bloworth
Crossing (13½ miles) This major crossroads is where I leave the friendly, waymarked Cleveland Way. Now it’s just the Lyke Wake and the C2C, following a cinder track which marks the line of a dismantled railway as it loops round the head of beautiful Farndale.
The western half of the route follows the scarp of the Cleveland Hills, with stunning scenery and a lot of up and down. The eastern half is pretty much continuous moorland.
Time for some more backstory. Where did the Lyke Wake come from? The answer is Bill Cowley, a farmer from Swainby with a passion for walking (he had led three Himalayan expeditions) and a wickedly warped sense of fun. He wrote an article in the August 1955 issue of Dalesman magazine in which he laid out the route and set the challenge of walking it in 24 hours.
The route would follow a steady line of ancient burial mounds and memorial crosses, giving rise to the funereal theme. He later christened it the Lyke Wake Walk, ‘lyke’ meaning corpse; ‘wake’ meaning to watch over one. In October ’55, Cowley did it with a group of walkers who had responded to his article, walking from noon on the 1st to 11am on the 2nd. Word spread fast, and the Lyke Wake rapidly became the country’s most popular challenge walk.
From it sprang the Lyke Wake Club (headed by Cowley himself as Chief Dirger), logging crossings and selling merchandise. From the late Fifties to the early Eighties, hundreds of thousands walkers took on the Lyke Wake. In June 1975 alone, 3141 walkers completed it. Celebrities walked it for TV; ▶ “The next 13 miles. It sounds weird, talking about a distance that would normally be a long day’s walk as being just a fraction of what I’m actually hoping to do.”