I don’t often read Sunday Times bestsellers, but this year I read three in quick succession, all by the same author. There aren’t that many Sunday Times bestsellers about long-distance hiking, a relatively niche genre, but there is one that has struck a chord with so many people over the last five years that it has transcended its niche and broken into the mainstream. Friends and neighbours who I wouldn’t have suspected to be fans of travel writing have been recommending it. Edita liked it so much that she immediately bought its two sequels and read those too. After she finished, I followed suit.
The book in question is The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. First published in 2019, it has already sold over a million copies and spent more than 80 weeks as a Sunday Times bestseller. Its two sequels, The Wild Silence and Landlines, also topped the non-fiction list.
The Salt Path follows the true story of Raynor and her husband Moth, who invested in a friend’s business without realising that when the business failed, they would be liable for its debts. The “friend” and his creditors pursued them through the courts for their principal asset – the smallholder farm they had owned, renovated and farmed for over thirty years.
They also used part of the farmhouse for holiday rentals. When they lost the legal case, therefore, they lost not only their home but their livelihood. From having a comfortable, idyllic lifestyle, they were suddenly and mercilessly homeless and penniless. And this wasn’t all that Raynor was destined to lose. Two days later, she learned that Moth, her partner of thirty years, was terminally ill with a rare and incurable form of dementia that caused the muscles in his body to gradually weaken.
With limited time left together, no money and no career experience that might naturally lead to a good job, they decided to pack rucksacks and a tent and hike the South West Coast Path, a 1,000km long-distance trail around the coast of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.
You’re probably thinking, well, that sounds like a barrel of laughs. But read on. Far from being bleak and depressing, it’s a book full of hope. At its heart, it’s a love story whose main theme is that even in the depths of despair there is a light somewhere in the distance. Moreover, on that journey from darkness to light, great things can be achieved.
The Salt Path is a great book on so many levels. Some of the best travel books are accidental stories covering events that no writer in the wildest throes of madness could possibly have wished for. For example, Eric Newby didn’t sign up for the army and hope to be taken as a prisoner-of-war because he thought it might be a good idea for a book. But from precisely those events came his masterpiece and one of my favourite travel books of all time, Love and War in the Apennines.
The Salt Path is a book very much in that tradition. It has one of the most powerful openings of any travel book I can remember. But I think one of the things that has chimed with readers is that it addresses the fears that many of us have, seen through the eyes of two positive and relatable characters. When positive characters work as a team, helping each other over each barrier, there is rarely a moment for despair to take hold. It’s this that makes the story inspirational and ultimately uplifting. Some weeks into the trip, they discover that physical activity is the antidote to Moth’s illness, and he has been gradually regaining the skills that he lost.
Many of us can relate to having loved and lost, and approximately half of us will have to cope with the loss of the person most dear to us at some point in our lives. The great weight and sense of deep foreboding that Raynor carries around with her, is only too easy to appreciate.
Many of us have also experienced financial hardship. While very few will ever have fallen from complete security to deepest poverty quite so rapidly as Raynor and Moth, the fear of it happening gradually over time is probably something many people experience great anxiety about.
Every night as they hiked the trail they looked for a quiet spot to wild camp, hoping that a landowner didn’t arrive and ask them to move. Once a week they went to a cashpoint to withdraw the social benefits they were entitled to. This was supposed to be £48, but often they found there was only around £30 in their account, that would have to last them for a week. Paying for accommodation was out of the question. Even £10 for a campsite was crippling and meant they had to go without food.
When I read John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath, about hardship during the 1930s American Dust Bowl, I remember experiencing guilt for sympathising with a murderer. There were scenes in The Salt Path that gave me similar feelings. Raynor and Moth are such likeable characters that it takes a hard heart not to sympathise with them, even when they break the law.
The crimes they committed include: shoplifting (which happened only once and Raynor was immediately remorseful), sneaking into a campsite and leaving before being asked to pay (many times), collecting money for storytelling on a street corner in St Ives (which requires a licence), and of course, wild camping, which is illegal almost everywhere in England, and which carries the additional crime of trespass when done on private land. This is a crime they had to commit every day because there was nowhere else for them to stay.
Since the book’s publication, Raynor has become a high profile champion for the homeless. The issue of homelessness and its causes is a thread that runs through the book. Raynor and Moth meet many homeless people on their journey, from those in the streets of Plymouth who are wrestling with mental illness, to those in other coastal villages who are well-balanced and living industrious lives, but have simply been priced out. All of them are treated with respect and sensitivity. Every reader will emerge from the book with a little more understanding of those who are going through desperate times.
The book also addresses the perceptions of homelessness in those they meet. When they told strangers along the route that they had sold their house to spend several months walking the path (a lie), they were held in awe and treated as inspiring. But when they were more honest, said they were homeless and doing it out of necessity, conversations petered out into awkward silence.
There were many acts of kindness described in the story, but even some of these came with ulterior motives. There was the man who invited them to his cottage for a meal because he thought that Moth was Simon Armitage, the poet laureate, who happened to be walking the path at the same time. Then there was the friend who, halfway through their trek, offered them free accommodation in their outbuilding on condition they renovated it. When the job was finished, they were turfed out unexpectedly so that the building could be rented. There were also acts of kindness that were misguided, such as those from the many people who gave them lifts or directions to a campsite that they couldn’t afford.
I also enjoyed The Salt Path for the style of writing. Raynor is attuned to nature, but she writes accessibly. The smell of salt from the sea, or the sweeter aromas of bracken and wild blackberries are described in terms that anyone can understand. The rugged coastline that rises steeply into thick wet mist, then falls again to the next busy fishing village, come alive on the page. But the writing is down to earth; there is no fine writing, the popular style of nature writing that is poetic but incomprehensible to most ordinary people. There is also plenty of dialogue featuring colourful and entertaining characters.
It would be churlish to say that I found the ending unsatisfactory given that it’s a true story about people who deserved a bit of good fortune. Without wishing to give too much away, like a Dickens novel the ending seems a bit too convenient, but this is my only criticism of an otherwise great book.
The Wild Silence is a little more disjointed and lacking a central theme. It contains all the elements that made The Salt Path such a compelling read without tying them together quite so smoothly.
It falls into three main parts. In the first, which is a little too long and may test the patience of fans of the first book, Raynor sits in hospital watching her terminally ill mother endure her final days. The pace quickens as Raynor starts documenting their journey along the Salt Path, embarking on her first tentative steps as a professional writer.
The tone becomes more optimistic in the second part of the book. A fan offers Raynor and Moth a chance to renovate a derelict farmhouse and turn its grounds into an organic farm. There is more doubt and conflict. You wonder if this is another kind offer hiding the threat of exploitation. But Raynor now wields a power that she didn’t have before, in the form of her new-found fame.
The third and final part of the book covers a trek along the Laugavegur Trail in Iceland. Moth’s condition has been deteriorating again, and they hope that a long walk may help to cure him as it did before. Here we return to the jaunty travelogue, written in plain-English style, that made The Salt Path such a refreshing read.
Raynor returns to form for the third and most recent book in the series, Landlines, which isn’t about telephones, but another long walk the length of Britain from north to south. It’s another emotional rollercoaster with ups and downs, sorrow and desperation, that is ultimately uplifting.
Landlines has perhaps the most poignant opening of all three, as Raynor appears to be documenting the latter stages of Moth’s terminal illness. Now struggling for balance and spending longer and longer in bed, he appears to have accepted his fate and is ready to let go. In desperation, Raynor tempts him into one last hike, dangling the carrot of Cape Wrath, a place he has always wanted to visit, in front of him.
He accepts the challenge. They set off to hike the Cape Wrath Trail. He gradually starts to recover. They keep going, the length of Scotland, then England.
This feels like a more comfortable journey. They are now able to afford the occasional hotel room, or take a train to link up sections. They even buy brand new bikes for one part. I’m amused to discover that Raynor hates cycling as much as I do.
Then, just as Moth appears to be making a full recovery, he has a setback, leading to a final twist.
This is a book about real people. Anyone can google whether or not Moth is still alive, but I resisted that temptation until I had read all three books and knew the outcome of the final one.
If you’re thinking that I’ve diverted from this blog’s main theme by reviewing a trilogy of books about hiking rather than mountains, that’s where you’re wrong. Iceland and Scotland, the settings for The Wild Silence and Landlines, contain many mountains. As for The Salt Path, anyone who has walked the shortest section of the South West Coast Path will tell you that the coastline of southwest Britain goes up and down like a kangaroo on a trampoline. By the time you’ve completed all 1,000km, you will have ascended and descended around 35,000m – which, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is approximately 1.2 Everests.
If that doesn’t persuade to read The Salt Path then I’ve done all I can.
