One day in 2013, bailiffs were at Moth and Raynor’s door. Gone is the small farm in Wales that this couple in their fifties had transformed into a tourist lodge and a livelihood. Gone is the house in which they had lived for twenty years and raised their two children. They will lose everything.
At the end of a three-year legal battle which was played out on a detail of procedure, they had been found responsible for the debts after the bankruptcy of the company of a childhood friend of Moth in which they had invested.
What to do ? As much out of desperation as necessity, they decide to leave, leaving the past behind them and embarking on the famous South West Coastal Path, which stretches 1013 kilometers between Minehead and Poole Harbour, passing through Land’s End, to the southern tip of England. A backpack each, sleeping bags that were too thin, a tent bought second-hand on eBay, a stove and a copy of the Beowulf in the poet Seamus Heaney’s translation.
As if that weren’t enough, soon after, six years after the first symptoms appeared, Moth, 53, is diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, a rare brain disease that leaves him only a few years old. to live. Never mind.
They persist, they advance. Painfully at first, surviving on $75 tax credits they receive each week. Mowed down like the wheat, perhaps also unconscious, they will experience hunger, cold, pain, humidity—the dazzling greenery of the English countryside has its downside.
It feels a bit like they are playing their last card on this trail, in tears and sweat, carrying in addition to their bags the weight of the guilt linked to their mistakes.
They will put dandelion greens in their white rice, often share a tea bag, dream of plump treats, cold beers and trays of fries. They will sometimes also come up against the hostility of people who only see them as a traveling couple, inevitably dirty, drunk with something other than the fatigue of walking. All truth is not good to say.
“Each glen crossed was a victory, each day we had survived a reason to tackle the next day”, writes Raynor Winn in The salt paththe beautiful story she drew from this slightly crazy adventure that took them through abandoned mines, fishing villages transformed into tourist factories, breathtaking landscapes.
Over the kilometers, a feeling of freedom comes to replace the pains of the body and that, more bitter, to have lost everything. Against all odds, Moth will also get better, pushing back the disease a little.
Halfway, the couple will spend the winter in a kind of shed that a friend has lent them before heading back on the road, having no good reason not to continue.
Raynor Winn had started writing this story so that her husband could remember those difficult but happy days on the coastal path. The success was phenomenal: over a million copies were sold in English.
To destination, The salt path is as much a love letter as a testimony of resilience. An ode to nature and life in the great outdoors. A reminder of the cycle of life and death that each of us is a part of.