The New Lyke Wake Club

Three Crossings, One Frog, and a Man Who Should Have Known Better

Or: how to fail to learn a lesson over the course of five years.

My relationship with the Lyke Wake Walk began, as all the best disasters do, over a drink. A colleague asked whether I “fancied joining a group doing a walk in the North York Moors.” I said yes, because at that point I still believed words like walk and moors to be reassuring. This was June 2018.

The crossing was completed in fifteen hours. My dignity was not completed at all. By the time we reached the youth hostel in Whitby, my legs had filed for divorce, and I was reduced to descending the stairs backwards, heel first, like a man abseiling without rope or competence. I vowed, with the conviction of the truly broken, never to do it again.

The Walk, you understand, is named for the watching-over of corpses. I had assumed this was metaphorical. It is not.

Act II — The Memory of a Goldfish

Five years, it turns out, is precisely how long it takes me to forget pain. In June 2023 I not only agreed to cross again, I organised it. Ten brave souls signed up. Three turned up. One of those three gave up at the ten-mile mark — which, by my arithmetic, gives the Walk a 70% attrition rate before anyone’s even had a properly bad time. The survivors crossed in eighteen hours. The dirge sings to people, it seems, before they’ve finished lacing their boots.

Act III — The Foolish Boast

I manage a junior team at Dinnington RUFC. During a perfectly innocent discussion about fundraising, a parent suggested the Lyke Wake Walk and kindly began explaining what it was. Rather than confess that I had already limped across it twice while questioning my life choices, I said — and I cannot overstate how foolish this was — “Oh, I know the route.”

And so, crossing number three. The 12th of June, six of us departing Cod Beck Reservoir at 19:00: Johnny (my long-suffering LWW companion, and the only man who keeps coming back — which says something about us both), Ellie, Anne, Ange and Mikey.

The first ten miles went suspiciously well. Then one of the group began to shriek — a sound of such pure, undiluted terror that it must surely have carried as far as Middlesbrough. I braced for the worst: a body in the heather, the Hound of the Baskervilles, the Grim Reaper arriving early to collect.

It was a frog. Sitting in the middle of the path. Minding its own amphibian business.

Reader, I was unaware that Ellie suffered from ranidaphobia. Note to self: all future pre-walk questionnaires must screen for this, alongside the standard checks for ambulophobia, agoraphobia, and completion anxiety. On a route named after the dead, it was — fittingly — the one living thing that nearly finished us off.

The frog, it turned out, was the easy part.

The Long Dark Bog of the Soul

At twenty miles the maths arrived, and the maths is cruel. Someone did the sum out loud — “hang on, are we only half way?” — and you could feel the morale leave the group like air from a slow puncture. Forty miles is a number you can say cheerfully in a pub. It is a different number entirely at one in the morning with a bog where your feet used to be.

By Rosedale Moor the group had nothing left. The bogs had taken their toll — and at least one casualty was permanent, Ange parting with two toenails for the privilege of crossing. Honestly, the Lyke Wake Club should issue them as commemorative pin badges.

The wind was doing its best to relocate us to the Irish Sea, so I made a Leadership Decision. “Let’s not rest here,” I said, with the easy confidence of a man pointing at a map. “Wheeldale plantation gives some shelter, and it’s not far.” Friends, not far on the map and not far in the heather at 2am are not the same distance. They are not even the same unit of measurement. Two hours later we collapsed into the heather at the plantation and were granted a fifteen-minute power nap — generously soundtracked by Mikey and Johnny snoring like a brass section warming up.

The Mast That Lied

Onward to Fylingdales Moor, where I made my second great error of the walk. I pointed out a mast on the horizon and announced that it marked the finish. This was meant to inspire. (For the record, I have since established it was an unidentified transmitter mast near Ravenscar — radio, probably — and not, as I’d implied with great authority at 4am, the literal end of our suffering.)

It did inspire, for roughly four minutes. Then the mast became the group’s entire universe — and the trouble with a distant mast is that it has the manners not to get any closer. We walked for what felt like hours. The mast did not move. One of the group began a steady chant of how far, how long, which gradually simplified into a single word, directed at me, repeated with the patience of a metronome: “liar.” Over. And over. I have been called many things on the moors. That night I learned which ones stick.

We Buried Them at Last

And yet — we crossed. All six of us limped over the finish on the Saturday at 15:15: twenty hours and fifteen minutes, fully unsupported, every gram of it carried on our own backs. Slower than my fifteen-hour first crossing and my eighteen-hour second, which I choose to read not as evidence of decline but as proof I’m savouring the place more each time. For a group that had been emotionally bested by an amphibian and a transmitter mast, I’ll take it. Bill Cowley would, I hope, have nodded grimly and bought a round.

The whole undertaking was in aid of the Dinnington RUFC Under-14s, who train hard, play harder, and remain blissfully unaware of the suffering committed in their name. If you’d like to make two lost toenails and one shattered friendship feel worthwhile, the lads would be very grateful: https://gofund.me/21ac3cf06. Every pound buys a small piece of dignity I will personally never recover.

Would I do it again? Absolutely not. Ask me again in five years.