The Ghost Lake

THE GHOST LAKE is a powerful, vivid and deeply personal memoir that weaves together nature writing with an exploration of grief, belonging and the lives and legacies of rural working‐class people.



Paleolake Flixton, the ‘ghost lake’, is an extinct lake in North Yorkshire. Inhabitation of the site goes back thousands of years, but today all that is left of the lake is a watermark.


Wendy Pratt brings the reader on a pilgrimage around this extinct lake, to specific locations that have acted as journey markers in her own life, while reflecting on the process of finding belonging in nature as a woman who exists in a series of liminal spaces – as a working-class writer, as an infertile woman in a fertile world, as a bereaved mother in a society focused on children.


THE GHOST LAKE is an examination of the power that landscape holds over people throughout their lives. It’s also a story about the legacies of the ancient lake people, and about the remnants that modern-day lake people will leave behind for future generations to uncover.