The View GUEST COLUMN 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 –…
