Summary
Clare Balding undertakes a section of the Lyke Wake Walk on the North York Moors. The route was originally devised sixty years ago by a local farmer who issued a challenge in the Dalesman magazine. He thought it might be possible to cross 40 miles of the Moors from near Osmotherley to Ravenscar in 24 hours, crossing only one or two roads. A club was formed following the first successful crossing, and with a blackly humorous nod to the pain and suffering endured by walkers, a tradition grew of reciting an ancient song known as the Lyke-Wake Dirge which tells of the soul's journey from earth to purgatory. The route was named after this dirge. Clare is joined by veterans and newcomers to the walk, who are known - depending on the number of crossings they've made - as Dirgers, Witches, Doctors of Dolefulness, Masters of Misery or, the most senior of all, Past Masters or Mistresses.
Producer: Karen Gregor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I want to tell you why I love podcasting. Hi, my name's Tommy Dixon, |
| 0:06.3 | and I make podcasts for the BBC. I'm a big fan of stories, always loved a good book. But when I started |
| 0:12.0 | commuting for my first job, I discovered podcasts. I was blown away by how a creative idea and the right |
| 0:17.8 | mixture of sounds could take you into a whole new world full of incredible stories. You know, the type that make you go, wow. And that kind of inspired me to |
| 0:25.2 | give it a go myself, which to cut a long story short led to a BBC training scheme and a whole |
| 0:29.9 | new career giving other people that exact same feeling. So if you want to hear amazing stories |
| 0:34.1 | that make you go wow like I did, they're just a tap or click away on BBC |
| 0:38.0 | sounds. This is a BBC Radio 4 download. You're listening to me, Claire Balding with another |
| 0:44.4 | edition of Ramblings. Welcome to the Cleveland Hills. It's an overcast, breezy day, and I've joined |
| 0:52.7 | a group of walkers who are committed to a path |
| 0:56.9 | that you won't find on any map but for them has extreme resonance and it's called the like |
| 1:03.4 | wake walk and ian alongside me wrote into the program to tell us about it because you wanted to share |
| 1:10.2 | really your group's passion for this walk. |
| 1:12.1 | So just give me the background to us and the history, first of all, of how this walk from Osmotherly in Yorkshire, |
| 1:18.3 | right across to Ravenscar on the coast, which is between Scarborough and Whitby, how it started. |
| 1:23.0 | In the 1940s, the Second World War, there was a Yorkshire farmer called Bill Cowley, who was in India as a civil servant. |
| 1:34.2 | And he was spent a lot of time thinking about home. |
| 1:37.4 | One of the things he thought about was it would be possible to walk from one end of the moors to the other, which is about 40 miles, depending on the path you take, |
| 1:47.3 | and that if you were reasonably fit, you could walk that route in one day. |
| 1:52.8 | So he set out a challenge in the Dalesman magazine, |
| 1:56.9 | offering a cup to anyone who could actually do that. |
| 2:00.3 | At that time, it's quite a challenge because there were no paths on the hymoers at that time |
... |
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