The View
Like so many people, I have turned to walking in times of grief. Not to shy away from pain, but to look it in the face and keep breathing.
ON 1ST AUGUST 2020, at 6.45am, I touch a stone carved with the words ‘Lyke Wake Walk’ and set off alone on a 41-mile route across the North York Moors. Over the next 10 hours 55 minutes, I walk, jog, occasionally run and often rest. The walk takes me across peaks and peat, dry gorse trying to flower, disused railway tracks and frothing becks, inland and coastal cliffs, views towards Middlesbrough’s chimneys and Bronze Age burial mounds, radio masts and a radar base, and not many people. Until the final mile through Ravenscar, the whole 41-mile route passes only two human habitations.
I have spent days in the Yorkshire branch of the British Library, poring over nearly 70-year-old articles in which the Lyke Wake Walk’s founder – a local farmer called Bill Cowley – described his desire for a footpath traversing the entire width of the Moors, almost purely through heather. When he hiked his route, he found it so arduous that he joked that he felt like a corpse. He knew that there was a local medieval folk song called the ‘Lyke Wake Dirge’, which compared the purgatorial trials inflicted on a corpse (a ‘lyke’) in the period between death and burial (the ‘wake’) to the crossing of a ‘whinny’ (thorny) moor. And with dark Yorkshire humour, Cowley borrowed the name for his new route. As the Lyke Wake Walk’s popularity rose, a number of morbid traditions formed: waymarkers with black coffins punctuated the trail, and a Lyke Wake Club was founded, which sent black-edged condolence cards to hikers who successfully completed a ‘crossing’ in less than 24 hours.
I’d previously thought of long-distance walks only as life-affirming activities: pilgrimages to meaningful sites, or convivial social events, or goals that motivate us to get fitter or raise money. But the Lyke Wake Walk reminds me that there is a darker side to long-distance walking too. Psalm 23:4 imagines a journey through the valley of the shadow of death as a walk, and it is not coincidence, I think, that so many people – from Henry David Thoreau to Cheryl Strayed – turn to walking when they are in the midst of loss. Long-distance walking manifests, writ large, many of the qualities of the experience of grief. It makes grief obvious, inescapable, real – and it also reminds us that we have the resources to endure it.
I am doing the Lyke Wake Walk today because I have spent the last year in the valley of the shadow of death, and it is the only route that matches my state of mind. As I describe in my book, In Her Nature, in 2019 four members of my family died, including my father and my stepfather. Since then, my husband has taken his own life. My experience of grief has been of complete isolation; of unr
