Walking 42 miles in one day: tackling North Yorkshire’s Lyke Wake route on its 70th anniversary

The walk across the North York Moors – which has to be completed in 24 hours – is a mix of trudging and wild beauty. I experienced both as I joined one of the first people to do it in 1955

One August evening in 1955, members of York Mountaineering Club had convened in the city’s Olde Starre Inne. They were, perhaps, lamenting the shortage of mountains (or indeed hills) in York, when club chair David Laughton turned up waving a copy of that month’s Dalesman magazine.

It contained a challenge, issued by Bill Cowley, author of the Farmer’s Diary column. Cowley would provide a cup – “an inexpensive one” – to anyone who traversed the North York Moors in less than 24 hours: “… You would cross Carlton Moor, Cringle Moor and Cold Moor; Botton Head and Bloworth; the long flat expanse of Stony Ridge … over Howl Moor and Simon Howe, by Tom Cross Rigg and Snod Hill to Lilla Cross, then over Fylingdales Moor … to the sea.”