The Ghost Lake

A memoir of grief, nature and ancestry in rural Yorkshire

The Ghost Lake is a deeply personal, lyrical and stirring meditation on local history and changing landscapes that intertwines nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging and the lives and legacies of rural working‐class people.The Ghost Lake is a deeply personal, lyrical and stirring meditation on local history and changing landscapes that intertwines nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging and the lives and legacies of rural working‐class people.

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.