Landlines: Raynor Winn on life after The Salt Path

“My boot slips on the damp rock, shifting the weight of the rucksack on my back and I skid towards the chasm below,” she writes, recalling how the ground suddenly gave way beneath her feet.

“Grasping a boulder ahead of me I stop my fall, but a landslide of stone hurtles down the near vertical wall of dripping vegetation, disappearing into the depth of the gorge. I cling to the rock and shiver, gripped by electric shocks of fear running through my body.”

When we speak on a Monday morning in early September, Raynor, 59, is safely ensconced in her office on the Cornwall farm where the couple live and work. Yet, as she begins to recount events with pinpoint detail, it feels as if I am standing alongside her and Moth on that fateful day last year.

“It was absolutely terrifying,” she says. “We maybe should have waited until morning, but I don’t know if that would have made any difference. We started going into the falls in the early evening. It seemed like a narrow path that was going up the hillside, until we reached an area where it was so rocky that we were climbing over boulders.

“The narrow path on the hillside was like this,” she uses her hand to indicate the steepness and sheer drop. “There was dampness from the falls and then the roar of the water below us because it had been raining.

“The rocks were slippery under our feet. We were trying to hold onto the wet vegetation around us because the weight of the rucksacks on our backs was skewing our sense of gravity.”

There was a point, admits Raynor, that the couple feared they might be trapped there forever. Then something incredible happened. A near-miracle that saw hope soar for the first time in many months.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The journey begins almost a decade earlier. Many readers will be familiar with Raynor’s spellbinding debut, The Salt Path, which documented her and Moth’s experiences along a 630-mile stretch of windswept and sea-lashed coastline.

Their time on the trail, known as the South West Coast Path, came after the couple’s world was shattered by a series of seismic events in 2013. Within the space of a week, Moth was diagnosed with a rare, terminal illness and they were evicted from their beloved farmhouse in Wales by bailiffs.

Left with little more than the rucksacks on their backs, the pair bought a tent on eBay and two thin sleeping bags. They began walking the remote and wild route from Somerset to Dorset, finding themselves on a life-altering adventure.

Life after The Salt Path is something Raynor gets asked about a lot. Since penning her international bestselling memoir in 2018, she has received countless messages enquiring about her husband’s health. (An oft-Googled question is: “What happened to Moth?”)

Moth, now 62, was diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and progressive neurological disorder, nine years ago. The doctor said that the average life expectancy was six to eight years – by then it had already been six years since Moth’s symptoms became apparent.

The couple were told that, as the condition progressed, Moth would experience worsening problems with his movement, speech, memory and swallowing. It felt like they were living on borrowed time, but then, as they made their way along the South West Coast Path, there came a surprising epiphany.

“Something strange happened on that walk, strange and totally unexpected,” Raynor writes in Landlines. “After two hundred miles of walking over endless headlands, carrying everything we needed to survive on our backs, Moth’s health began to improve in ways that should have been impossible.

“His gait became almost normal, his thoughts cleared, his short-term memory sharpened and movements that had been almost impossible before became easy. This shouldn’t have happened. CBD is a one-way street.”

It is something they have since experienced with other hikes, including on the Laugavegur Trail in Iceland, an arduous eight-day trek across lava fields, glaciers, and icy rivers. And it is why the couple decided to head for Scotland last year and embark upon a long-held dream: to tackle the formidable Cape Wrath Trail.

The catalyst came in early 2021 when Moth collapsed at home on the farm. The raw anguish of this incident is still palpable as Raynor reflects on it now. “It was this moment when Moth’s health was at such an all-time low and he was thinking that maybe we were getting close to the end,” she says.

“I was getting some gloves out of the log basket when a few guidebooks fell off the shelf. I saw the Cape Wrath guidebook. It was unused. This thin little guidebook. It was a place that Moth had always wanted to spend time. I thought if anywhere would encourage him to walk and try again, it would be that one.

“It has always had such a draw; the idea of it being such a remote and isolated area that you can only get to on foot or by boat, through the great wilderness and the Rough Bounds of Knoydart. There was something almost magnetic about the wildness of those areas.”

Moth took a bit more convincing but as they talked about tackling the 230-mile trail, the sparkle and determination returned to his eyes.

Scotland holds a special place in their hearts. Their first holiday as a couple, some 40-odd years ago, was to climb The Fiddler, north of Ullapool. They later eloped to Portree on Skye, tying the knot in the back of a hardware shop because the registry office was closed for renovations.

Did the Cape Wrath Trail have such a strong pull because of those fond memories? “I think so,” says Raynor. “Those early trips to Scotland imprinted something of that wildness on us. We have a passion for those landscapes. To try to find a way back into that I thought, for him, might do the trick.”

Patience was needed. Lockdown restrictions meant waiting several months until the Scottish border reopened. Finally, in May last year, they were able to begin their journey north. Raynor felt the first fluttering of hope gently beating its wings.

“It had worked when we were on the South West Coast Path in ways that we had been told were impossible,” she says. “It was the only hope we had. It was the only thing that had helped his health: climbing, nature and walking as much as we possibly could.

"What better thing to do than go and walk in a place that he had always wanted to visit? A place that we knew from those early days was stunningly beautiful.”

Travelling in a pandemic, though, brought an additional layer of complexity. Not only did they have the worry about the health implications of Moth potentially catching coronavirus, but many hotels, restaurants and cafes remained closed, making it challenging to source food and supplies.

Then came the disappointment and frustration of being unable to reach their intended start point on the trail. A chance encounter at Sheigra Beach helped bring some fresh perspective.

“We were heading to the lighthouse at Cape Wrath itself, but the military had closed off the area and there was nothing we could do about that,” explains Raynor. “At that point Moth was like, ‘If it is not the Cape Wrath Trail, then what is it? What are we doing? It is not going to work …’

“We were at this incredible beach where the rocks are pink. We saw a white-tailed eagle fly over. Wheatears were collecting in the short sandy grass. It was such a beautiful and magical place.

“We met some rock climbers who were just about to go over the edge of the cliffs one night. We were telling them how we planned to do the Cape Wrath Trail, but we couldn’t get to Cape Wrath. They said, ‘Then make it the Sheigra Trail. Anything that starts from here has got to be stunning’.”

And so, the couple began an odyssey that would see them walk 1,000 miles from this north-west corner of Scotland all the way to the south coast of Cornwall.

In Landlines, she refers to their endeavours as “the trail of hope” – does that still ring true? Raynor nods animatedly, pausing as Moth pops up on the Zoom screen behind her, making a brief cameo to bring his wife some tea.

“By the time we got back to the south coast, it felt as if that whole walk had become the Sheigra Trail somehow,” she says. “When we were talking to those climbers in that beautiful evening light they said, ‘You have got to put yourself in the way of hope and allow it to come into your life.’”

The kindness of strangers is an overarching theme of all three of her books. It was woven throughout The Salt Path, present in The Wild Silence and again loomed large within Landlines.

“Those moments always come out of the blue and when you are not expecting them, like the taxi driver who gave us a lift and then went before we got a chance to pay him,” she says.

“Or reaching a hotel where we felt alien and as if we didn’t belong when we arrived, but then realised the people were the kindest and most warm-hearted you could possibly meet. By the time we left, they had filled our rucksacks with food and bottles of beer.

“There is incredible kindness right through Scotland. The people were so welcoming and helpful. Kindness that came from nowhere and it was wonderful.”

All along the gruelling Cape Wrath Trail, the pair found beauty and brutality starkly juxtaposed. They immersed themselves in nature and enjoyed spectacular close encounters with wildlife.

“We were at Loch an Nid,” says Raynor. “Before we went down into the glen it was raining all around us, but we were dry, almost as if all the water from the sky was being funnelled down this one glen. We said, ‘We can’t be going down there, surely?’ But that was absolutely where we were going.

“We got down into the glen bottom and managed to get across the river which was rising as we were crossing it. It was raining so hard. It was pouring down off the mountainside like a solid sheet waterfall. This river, that would normally have been a foot deep, was rising to thigh level.”

Then disaster struck.“Moth slipped on the stony ground, fell and cut his head open,” she says. “He was bleeding. It was pouring with rain. We were saturated and there was no dry ground – only water, boulders and rough ground.

“Then we found a mound of dry ground. Right next to us was the river, which was in full spate and powering past. Behind us was this sheet waterfall coming off the mountain. On the opposite side of the river were these slabs of rock that sheets of water were pouring down.

“It felt like we were surrounded by water. We put the tent up anyway because there was nothing else to be done. We patched Moth up with stick-on sutures. We made a pot of tea and ate noodles.”

They awoke the next day to find a lull in the rain. “We realised all the deer had come down because they too were looking for somewhere dry,” says Raynor. “There was a group of hinds near the tent and over by a boulder, further away, was one stag standing on his own.

“In that moment, he shook himself like a dog when it comes out of the bath and as the low light came under the cloud base, it created this rainbow around him. There was this sense of us being part of the natural world.

"We were there in that landscape with the deer, that stag and the water. We weren’t observers, we were in it; we were the natural world. It was such an incredible moment. It will stick with me forever.”

Then came the mighty Falls of Glomach and a watershed moment where, just as it seemed all might be lost, a bright new hope was forged. “I was struggling to get over a boulder when suddenly this hand came down and pulled me up,” she says.

It was Moth. He had somehow passed her on the path. Raynor felt a strength and sureness in his grip that she hadn’t since they forded the glacial meltwaters of an Icelandic river a few years earlier.

“It was almost like the falls were the turning point,” she says. “They were the turning point for his health. It was terrifying at the time, but it is ingrained in my memory for those absolute extremes of emotion, from complete fear that we might die to the possibility that hope might be creeping back in.”

After completing the Cape Wrath Trail, you might think that doing another walk would be the last thing on their minds. Yet, in Fort William, the couple found themselves – quite by accident – at the bench which marks the end/beginning of the West Highland Way.

They took it as an omen. Their next adventure saw them hike the 96 miles south to Milngavie. How did that compare to the Cape Wrath Trail? “They are very different,” says Raynor. “By the time we got back to Cornwall, I realised that all these paths through the country have their own character.

“The contrast between the Cape Wrath Trail and the West Highland Way couldn’t have been more profound. The Cape Wrath Trail is what it says in the guidebook: remote and isolated. It is a walk through the wilderness where you might go for days without seeing anyone.

“As soon as we set foot on the West Highland Way it had a completely different character. It was communal and full of people connecting with each other, connecting with nature and connecting with some sort of rite of passage.

“It almost felt like a party on a path because everyone had their own joy that they were bringing to it. The West Highland Way was like a conveyor belt of humanity.”

Before wrapping our conversation, we circle back to Moth’s health. The huge emotional investment in their story from strangers all around the world brings some comfort, she admits.

“It is incredible,” says Raynor. “So many people get in touch wanting to know how Moth is and to wish him well. That is one of the most powerful things to have come from writing these books – the connection with the reader has been such a joy.

“Moth is not quite as well as he was when we finished walking that path last year. It is probably getting towards time for us to go for another walk.” She smiles softly. “But he really is in much better health than we could have even hoped for.”

Landlines by Raynor Winn (Penguin Michael Joseph, £20) is out now