The Ghost Lake

By Wendy Pratt

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.

Format: Hardback
Release Date: 15 Aug 2024
Pages: 272
ISBN: 978-0-00-863737-8
Wendy Pratt is a poet, author, editor and workshop facilitator living and working on the North Yorkshire coast, where she grew up. She is the author of five collections of poetry. Her collection When I Think of My Body as a Horse won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet award in 2021. She is founder and editor in chief of Spelt Magazine and facilitates online and in person writing courses and workshops.

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