The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn is a most wonderful book. A brave and inspiring memoir about two years in the lives of Raynor and Moth Winn.

I have often spoken dispiritedly about what I call “manufactured bestsellers”, books that are not superior in any way but can be marketed to the masses – they do not offend anyone, except by their mediocrity, but there is also nothing really worthwhile about them. Somehow they can be sold here, there and everywhere while many novels that are far more worthwhile languish in independent bookstores, or are never published at all.

But sometimes a really good book succeeds, and as Fenella Bates, the non-fiction publisher of The Salt Path by Raynor Winn states, “Raynor’s book has had the kind of impact we as publishers spend our lives trying to manufacture, but Raynor’s success is down to the very special book that she wrote.”

The Salt Path is indeed a very special book about an amazing couple, who in the face of economic ruin, homelessness and illness literally walked away from their past life. Faced with few choices, but getting on the waiting list for a council house, they packed away their remaining possessions, and with little more than sleeping bags and a small tent began to walk the 630 mile long South West Coast Trail from Somerset to Dorset, following Paddy Dillon’s book of maps. They had a small allowance – a sort of welfare payment – that they could draw on occasionally. It was barely enough to buy food, and often they were very hungry, starving in fact. They slept along the trail “rough camping”, and they walked and walked and walked. A couple whose bravery is more than inspirational.

This memoir is not only about the walk, and the countryside, but rumination on homelessness, and how one can become homeless. Raynor and Moth met a melting pot of people along this trail, some who were walking for adventure and had a schedule, and a home to return to. But, also those who came to England, walking and surfing and working just enough to pay for food and perhaps accommodation, before going south in the winter to a warmer place to do much the same thing. And, then there were the truly homeless, people who, often, through no fault of their own could not afford a place to live, as well as those who somehow could not fit themselves into a “normal” lifestyle.

The Salt Path is also the story of a couple, lovers since they were young students, now 50, an age when they expected to be relatively settled and secure, but found themselves without their home and employment, at the same time that Moth Winn was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a disease that would slowly, or perhaps rapidly, kill him. How does one deal with any of this? As Michael Crummey writes in his novel The Innocents “A body must bear what can’t be helped”.

Salt Path will be one of the best books you’ll read this year – and you’ll want to tell everyone you know the same thing.