The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (27 page)

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.

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 – worse even than the diabolical sulphur of an Irish dance hall or Father Fahey’s incinerated clutch. Never has the Lyke Wake Walk’s mournful iconography looked more pathetically appropriate.

Up the Brum: the Birmingham Main Line Canal, near Wolverhampton
Photo by Roger Kidd

In common with just about everyone else who spent a large part of the 1990s tugging on a spliff, I’m a huge fan of the late American comedian Bill Hicks. Pirate videos of his gigs were almost inevitably playing in the dark Birmingham rooms, curtains drawn against the sunlight, in which I wasted happy years. Hicks, whose brand of comedy was brutal yet pierced with the sharp light of truth, was a hero to us all, and we would swap lines with the same nerdy enthusiasm we’d swapped football cards 20 years earlier. Even through the fug of those years, I can remember that there was only ever one routine of his with which I disagreed, the basis of which was the opening line: ‘The beach! The beach – let’s go to the beach! Ah man, what is it about the beach? It’s just where dirt meets water.’ Apparently, he recanted on this view before he died. I only hope that his change of thinking came after some transcendentally magical days by the sea.

As an island nation, we are pulled towards the coast by a centrifugal force beyond our control. For those of us from the grubby middle of the country, for whom the sea was but a distant dream, this force is nothing short of mythic. Every family holiday to the seaside would include a hard-fought battle in the back seat to win the ‘first glimpse of the sea’ competition, one which I, hunched defensively over my OS map, would take as a challenge to my navigational skills. Not that the map was much help: a sudden peek of a distant sea in the nape of two hills could come almost anywhere, and would not be spotted amongst the flat contours and colours of the OS.

Years ago, I climbed Carn Llidi, a rocky outcrop at the western extremity of Wales, just beyond the tiny Pembrokeshire city of St David’s. There’s a stone seat sculpted by nature at the top, which gives you a phenomenal view of the Atlantic shimmering off into the distance, and I was looking forward to settling in it, enjoying a quiet smoke and watching the sun go down. As I neared the top, I saw to my annoyance that a couple had already bagged my spot. Getting nearer, I noticed, as they stared out to sea, their look of hypnotised wonder, like some syrupy image of children at prayer from a Victorian Bible. It was a look I knew well. ‘You’re not from the Midlands, by any chance, are you?’ I called out. ‘’Ow did yow know?’ the bloke hollered back, in a broad Black Country twang. ‘Er, just a hunch,’ I replied.

Carn Llidi sits above one of Britain’s best-loved rights of way, the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, established as one of the first tranche of National Trails in 1970. The idea had dated back to 1951, when local naturalist R. M. Lockley explored the possibility of linking together existing cliff-top and beach paths around the county, and filling in the missing gaps. Lockley was also instrumental in the creation, the following year, of the Pembrokeshire coast as a National Park, still the only one in Britain whose geography and character is almost entirely coastal. This helped cement in the national mind the idea that the coast of Pembrokeshire is uniquely blessed, and somehow the best of all. It isn’t: lovely though it often is, there are finer stretches of seaboard elsewhere in Britain, even in Wales. No matter, though, for this early boost to its credentials still plays out today in the enduring popularity of the county, and of its coast path in particular.

You need a certain frame of mind to want to walk any coast path, but especially the 186 miles (300 km) of the one that skips around the frilly edge of Pembrokeshire. Despite my starry-eyed Midlander’s love of the sea, it’s a frame of mind that escapes me. I honestly cannot think of a more pointless long walk than this one. The county is a peninsula, jutting square-jawed out into the sea from the south-western corner of Wales, but that one peninsula comprises dozens of smaller peninsulas, meaning that often the stark choice is to walk a slippery cliff-top for three or four miles around a windswept headland, or cheat and cut across its neck, sometimes a distance of just a couple of hundred yards. Not only that, the path goes up and down like a whore’s drawers, through rickety steps, startling vertigo and muddy slides, rarely having much of a flat stretch on which to stroll, breathe easy and take it all in. If you walk the whole path, from the outskirts of Cardigan to Amroth, on the county border with Carmarthenshire, you will go up and down a total of 35,000 feet. And after weeks of effort, blisters, mud, sunburn, stings, gales, shitting seagulls and aching calf muscles, you’ll reach Tenby, just a few miles short of the end, and there a mocking road sign that states:

reminding you that you could be back where you began, all those days and all that pain ago, within three-quarters of an hour.

It takes a special kind of mind – a rather calmer one than mine, I suspect – to appreciate that sort of exquisite torture. Perhaps I’m just too much of a dilettante, or cursed with the attention span of a goldfish, but at the end of a two-week walk (the average time taken to do the entire Pembrokeshire path), I’d like to feel that I’d actually gone somewhere, that I had progressed through different landscapes and taken with me a cumulative sense of wonder at how they all fit together. Mile upon mile of seabird sameyness, up and down, down again and then up a bit more, would snap my sanity, I feel sure. But it is for these very same reasons that many people adore paths such as this. Its sheer repetitiveness and constant proximity to the endless horizon of the Atlantic acts as a fortnight-long Zen meditation. It is, to some, a kind of ultimate challenge, to be locked in the now, to walk only for the journey and not for the destination. And if you’ve ever been to Amroth, you’ll know how doubly true that is.

All the stranger to my mind, therefore, that anyone would want to tackle the South West Coast Path (SWCP), Britain’s longest single waymarked trail at 630 miles (1,014 km). The official start is at Minehead in Somerset, then it threads all the way down the northern coast of Devon and Cornwall, then all the way back along their southern coasts and that of Dorset too, finishing at Poole Harbour. The South West is by far Britain’s favourite holiday playground, thanks to its comparatively mellow climate and plethora of good beaches – things that are, in other words, best enjoyed at a very leisurely pace. I’ve walked various sections of both the Pembrokeshire path and the SWCP, and quite wonderful they were too, but the idea of doing either in its entirety fills me with horror.

The section of the SWCP that I’ve most wanted to see for years was the one perhaps least connected to the sea itself. The seven-and-a-half-mile slither between Seaton, Devon and Lyme Regis, Dorset picks its way through unstable cliffs and land-slips, past ruined houses long since demolished by the caprice of Mother Nature. Due to its inherently precarious character, it is beyond cultivation, and a semi-tropical wilderness has grown up there, one so dense and primeval that only the occasional glimpse of the sea, far below, is gained from amongst the deep greenery. This is the Undercliff, and it has held a special place in my heart since studying John Fowles’s classic novel
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, for A-level English, a quarter of a century ago.

One of our teachers – a gaunt, rather ascetic New Zealander, now sadly dead – knew all too well that the best way to drag a group of lumpen Worcestershire teenagers towards an enthusiasm for Fowles’s book was to hit the button marked SEX. This he did with dry aplomb, making us read out loud all the bits where Charles Smithson, the soon-to-be-unbuttoned Victorian hero would delve deep into the Undercliff for assignations with the wild eponymous heroine, Sarah Woodruff (or Meryl Streep in a red fright wig, as she is rather better known). The fertile, damp, earthy Undercliff was everything that the prim cobbles of nearby Lyme Regis were not. It was abandoned and licentious, a steamy green Hades. It was, I think, the first time that I made the connection between a place and its sensual, even sexual, possibilities.

Finally heading to Lyme, a full 25 years later, I came from Woody’s house on the edge of Exmoor, and decided to take a look en route at some of the east Devon resorts that had also long been names to which I wanted to put faces. Not really knowing my Exmouth from my Sidmouth, or my Ottery St Mary from my Budleigh Salterton, I decided to trust in the map to tell me. On the OS Explorer, Budleigh Salterton looked appealing: there was something about its leering cliffs, crooked lanes and genteel detached villas that drew me in. Not marked on the map, but even more of a pleasure to discover, was the town’s nudist beach. That’d be a symbol I’d like to see on the Explorers. Far more useful than a picnic table or yet another cruddy visitor centre. They could even differentiate in the pictograms whether it’s a nudist beach where you have a chance of keeping your dignity, or very firmly not. Budleigh Salterton’s would be in the latter category. It’s a steep shingle beach, so that if you go for a swim, you have to get out by catching a wave to crash you on to the pebbles, and then scramble on your hands and knees to safety before the next wave gives you an unexpected enema. By the universal law that most of the people on a nudist beach are the ones you’d least like to see naked, it’s not a pretty sight.

The OS version of Seaton, by contrast, showed it as spreading away from the sea in a splurge of what looked like inter-war housing estates, a tedious delta of Acacia Avenues and Wordsworth Drives. Even the prom looked moribund on the map, and when I arrived there next morning on the bus from Lyme, in order to walk back through the Undercliff, the notion was proved depressingly right. Lyme looks terrific on the map, and so it is. Tight knots of alleys, cuts, tiny streets and warehouses tumble down assorted hills to the beach and to the outstretched claw of the Cobb, the town’s massive medieval harbour wall. It was there that we first meet the French Lieutenant’s Woman herself, swathed in a jet black cape as she stared out to sea and the waves crashed all around. And if you’re not picturing Meryl Streep at this point, you’re probably remembering the Scottish Widows advert that shamelessly plundered the movie.

In
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, the path into the Undercliff is ascribed an undeniably moral, or rather immoral, quality. To the monstrous Victorian archetype, Mrs Poulteney, it is, quite literally, the road to ruin. To Charles, it is a way of such beguiling temptation that he is unable to resist parting its ivy fronds and plunging in. You get the picture, I’m sure, and Fowles ladles it on (‘an English Garden of Eden’) with lip-licking gusto.

It is not just the uniquely jungle-like atmosphere that gives the Undercliff path its heady scent of musky eroticism. History has only augmented the sensation. On Christmas Eve 1839, the greatest landslip of modern times ripped this coast apart, as eight million tonnes of farmland, in a tranche nearly a mile long, detached itself and slid two hundred feet down towards the sea. When it finally juddered to a halt, it had created new chalk cliffs and stranded grass-topped pillars, their freshly exposed whiteness dazzling all who came to see. A vast chalk canyon half a mile wide separated the mainland from the sheared-off section, which quickly became known as Goat Island, a Satyric invocation to a place beyond the rules. A natural lagoon formed at the bottom of the landslip, and Parliament even debated building a deep-water harbour there, though it soon filled with rocks and earth from the initial slide and its after-shocks.

For the tourism business of Lyme Regis, the 1839 landslip could not possibly have come at a better time. The Regency finery of Jane Austen’s era, when Lyme came alive as the postscript to the season in Bath, was a fading memory. The Cobb had been spectacularly ruptured in a storm of 1824, blowing five ships out to sea. Although soon rebuilt, better and deeper harbours were springing up all along the coast. Modern seaside tourism seemed to be the only answer, and, to that end, the resort invested in four bathing machines and braced itself for the future. The Landslip – it was soon capitalised – catapulted it into the big time.