The Ghost Lake

Reviewed by Jeff Taylor 

Wendy Pratt (The Borough Press an Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers Ltd paperback edition published 2025)

In this recently published memoir, The Ghost Lake, the Yorkshire writer Wendy Pratt writes about making a pilgrimage around the periphery of Paleolake Flixton, an extinct post-glacial lake in North Yorkshire, a handful of miles south of Scarborough. She visits locations ‘that have acted as journey markers in her own life’.

Wendy takes ‘a series of deliberate journeys’ writing about ‘nature as refuge, and how belonging to landscape gives you a place to connect to your ancestors, even if those ancestors are only joined to you through the land you walk on.’

The main thread which runs through the narrative is the author’s history of a range of mental health issues including depression, social anxiety and lack of self-esteem, all underlined by what appears to be undiagnosed autism. She wonders if she can ‘find a way to reconnect with myself by gaining a greater understanding and appreciation of the landscape I have always been embedded in’.

Although an early draft of The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize, the pilgrimage, as described in the book, was made up of several individual trips which took place between June 2022 and July the following year. The author’s first trip is to the Woodlands Cemetery on the edge of Scarborough where she visits the grave of her daughter Matilda, who was stillborn in 2010. From the cemetery the author can see ancient woodland ‘studded with Bronze Age burial mounds’. In the following month she explores nearby Seamer Beacon, the site of a Bronze Age burial ground not far from where the author grew up. Two months later she visits the Mesolithic site at Star Carr with her mum. Both are grieving the recent death of her father. Her mum still lived on the small holding near Seamer which her parents had bought together and had worked hard to own. Her dad had wanted to be buried on their land, and he eventually got his way. But his daughter writes ‘burying a whole human is very, very complicated…’. In April 2023, on the anniversary of her daughter’s birth and death, Wendy takes flowers to her daughter’s grave then visits a Neolithic child burial site on Folkton Wold which is famously connected to three inscribed chalk objects known as the ‘Folkton Drums’. Afterwards she writes:

‘On the anniversary of my daughter’s death, I am feeling the familiar, yearly panic about her being forgotten. My pilgrimage to selfhood, to rootedness and belonging, is weighed down today by a desire to know that the dead are not forgotten’.

During her trips through these ancient landscapes, and to other locations linked to her own life and recent family history, Wendy Pratt explores themes such as loss, grief and belonging, birth and death, ritual and remembrance encountered by ordinary people over ten millennia and reflected in the landscape where they all walked.

The Ghost Lake also includes a sizeable bibliography listing the books, articles, journals and websites which the author used in her research. Wendy can be contacted via her own website https://wendyprattauthor.com/

Jeff Taylor