The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

I had read a lot about The Salt Path by Raynor Winn in various newspapers and websites, both as interviews with the author and in book reviews. With each piece of commentary I was more and more intrigued and wanted to get the book. Then my best friend got to it before me and confirmed everything that I had read about it, so really it was a no brainer to buy it myself.

Of course the fear when the interviews, the reviews and the personal recommendations are all so positive is, what happens if I don’t like it? Or even worse, what happens if I’m ambivalent about it? That’s always a bit of a horror reaction for me. I’d rather have a deep reaction to a book, even if that reaction is dislike, then just to be lukewarm about something that an author has take a lot of time and effort to craft.

Luckily, I can say hand on heart that I was not disappointed with The Salt Path. I was moved, shocked, furious, frustrated, breathless and uplifted by it, and none of those reactions was in the least lukewarm.

To summarise briefly what it’s about, it is the true story of Raynor and Moth Winn, who after 32 years together are left homeless after their family farmhouse in Wales is repossessed in the wake of debts caused by a bad investment brokered by a one-time friend. On top of this, Moth is diagnosed as terminally ill. With no where to go and nothing to stay for, against medical advice Raynor and Moth set out on an epic journey in the south west of England to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path from Somerset to Dorset, by way of Devon and Cornwall, carrying everything they need with them on their backs and wild camping along the way.

In addition to being an epic personal recounting of the walk, The Salt Path is a deep but never didactic social commentary about the fate of small people in the Britain of today. People who can’t negotiate the labyrinthine court system because they can’t afford representation. People who are displaced through no conscious fault of their own. People who are looked down upon because they are not out on a weekend adventure hike along the coast path, but are walking it because there is nowhere else to go, and the only thing they can do is put one foot in front of the other.

For all the underlying social commentary, this is a very human story. I felt like I came to know both Raynor and Moth. There are many moments of gentle humour, not least Moth being continually mistaken for the poet Simon Armitage, and moments of grand passion – Moth declaiming Seamus Heaney’s translation of Bewoulf in public will stay with me for a long time. However, it is Raynor’s calm, clear prose chronicling this unlooked for journey that makes The Salt Path so compelling, both in the narration of her and Moth’s trials and tribulations, but also her descriptions of the people they meet along the way.

I’m really glad that Raynor was brave enough to write The Salt Path, and I’m really glad that I read it because Raynor and Moth’s journey, both physical and emotional deserves to be read and shared and talked about because in reading it, I have to ask myself – faced with similar circumstances, could I have been so brave?

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn was originally published in 2018, and my copy was published by Penguin.