The Ghost Lake: A memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire

by Wendy Pratt

I am setting out on a pilgrimage through an ancient landscape.

I will begin at my daughter’s grave.

Paleolake Flixton is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Human occupation of the site dates back thousands of years to prehistoric times. Over the millennia, the vast lake disappeared, turning to wetland and peaty fields. Today all that is left of it is a watermark.

Wendy Pratt brings the reader on a pilgrimage around the ghost lake, to locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life. While traversing forests and fenland, she reflects on the process of finding belonging in nature as a woman who exists in a series of liminal spaces – as a working-class writer, an infertile woman in a fertile world and a bereaved mother in a society focused on children.

An early draft of The Ghost Lake was longlisted for the 2021 Nan Shepherd Prize.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

262 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 15, 2024

Reviews

[Katrina Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful, sad and engrossing exploration of belonging, time, liminal spaces, class, grief and connection to the world in a way that was beautiful to read.

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful book. Brilliantly written. Highest recommendation.

[Rudrashree Makwana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a deeply touching memoir. Everyone deals with grief in their own way. Life is unpredictable and we lose the people we love. Wendy has shared about herself, her life, her family background and has done a deep exploration on the extinct lake situated in North Yorkshire. I really like how insightful the memoir is and the author has shared about herself so well. The description of the lake gave me an eerie feeling. I was expecting the author to share more about rituals. I felt deeply for the author. This is a great memoir.

Thanks to the Publisher and Author.

[Margaret · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intensely personal and lyrical memoir from Poet Wendy Pratt. It's deeply rooted in two things: her deep connection to the part of East Yorkshire where she has lived her entire life; and the death, at the moment of her birth, of her much-wanted daughter. She focuses each chapter on a different community surrounding the Paleolake Flixton. This now vanished lake provides an epicentre to her story. Throughout the book she dwells on its own history; and her own - though not in order. Her father's decision not to continue the family tradition of farming; her own 'oddity' and inability to mix, to shine - despite her intelligence - at school; her chequered job and personal life; her conversion from working class girl to educated and successful - though always working class - career as a facilitator and poet. And always, threaded through the narrative, the much mourned dead baby daughter. A haunting, powerful and poetic memoir, bringing to life the natural world and landscape of her home patch, as well as exploring belonging, and loss.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book, written by a poet and you can tell, from the lyrical quality of her writing to the timing of the ebb and flow of the stories she is pulling on for this narrative. I procrastinated about starting the book knowing it touched on grief and the loss of a child, eventually picking it up to read in small doses over Christmas, but I did not need to. The heart of the book is a story of how the author has withstood the loss of her daughter by allowing all peripheral matters to burn off while discovering and holding on to the essence of herself, her motherhood and her daughter, drawing on deep attachments to where she lives and the history of other people who have lived there over millennia. The result, for me as a reader, was a journey through Time and emotion, not with searing force but with the kind of stillness and perspective I can get from being outside, walking through woodland, watching the sea on a beach. It is not least among this book's achievements that it conveys a kind of beautiful perspective while keeping its feet firmly in the ordinary details of grief lived on a daily basis. The author manages that feat of making the ordinary extraordinary, of showing the reader the minute detail and also opening our eyes to the vast sweep and pattern of Time that has come before us. In the end, I read the book in great gulps over the course of a busy week. It is beautiful and you should read it.

[Ivan Monckton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly, I read the hardback edition, which has not yet made it on to Goodreads.
This was a gruelling book to read, being a biographical account of the meaning of a relatively small area of the landscape the author has spent her difficult life in. She tells us of the terrible effect of losing her daughter just after birth and her father later on, of her lifelong struggles with ‘oddness’ and anxiety, and of her fight to make something of herself in the art (in its’ widest sense) world as a working class girl. I share her love of history, archaeology, landscape and natural history, and I sympathised with her struggles, but found the book pretty depressing. One hopes that the writing of this book helps to move her on.

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be a gentle and moving memoir about coming home to yourself and finding belonging through reconnecting with nature and experiencing the environment. It is also an absorbing meditation on class, living in a rural place near the sea that relies heavily on tourism to support its economy, as well as an interesting exploration of amateur archaeology. The author’s descriptions of loving and remembering her daughter who died and seeking an identity that doesn't include being a mother to a living child deeply resonated with me. I'm so glad to find books like this that include stories that are something like mine. They are still too rare.

[Sarah Woods · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautiful, lyrical memoir packed full of fascinating information about an area of North Yorkshire. It deals with death and grief but is not a sad book. In our modern world, we don't like to discuss these things, but will inevitably experience them, so it was illuminating to read such a thoughtful, well-crafted book on the subject. I was moved.

[Jen Scotney · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful memoir about place, belonging and grief. I loved the interaction between the writer’s current grief, the historical burial mounds, and the wild instinct in us all. The overall theme of exploring and existing over conquering gave the story a feeling of hope, at what we are capable of enduring.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

A powerful exploration of loss, place, connection and self.

[Lucy Allen-Goss · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful writing. I loved the meditations on landscape and rural life.