The Salt Path

The Salt Path is a 2018 memoir, nature, and travel book by Raynor Winn. It deals with the theme of homelessness and the true nature of home in the face of the unpredictability of life. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the Costa Book Awards, and won the 2019 RSL Christopher Bland Prize.

Book

Narrative

Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration, become homeless after a friend's business runs into trouble; he successfully sues them for their farmhouse, which he falsely claims they offered to his business as a guarantee. They decide to walk the 630-mile (1,010 km) South West Coast Path. They take cheap sleeping bags, a light tent, thin waterproofs, a lot of instant noodles, and hardly any money. They learn how to cope with the vagaries of a long-distance walk, hills, heat, cold, rain, navigation, and the curious people, landscapes, and wildlife they encounter as they go. The hard exercise somehow helps with Moth's stiffness. On the last day, after walking the whole path in two sections, in two successive summers, they meet a stranger who offers them the tenancy of a flat, right where they are, at Polruan.

Publication

The book has cover artwork in woodcut style by Angela Harding. The text is accompanied by an outline map of the South West Coast Path showing the main towns along the route.

Reception

Sam Wollaston, writing in The Guardian, comments that the story "sounds very gloomy. The book isn't though, nor its writer." Instead, the book is "funny, sometimes uplifting", as it weaves its story around the boundary between life and death. P. D. Smith, reviewing the book in the same paper, writes that "Their journey is filled with as many ups and downs as the undulating cliff-edge route." Smith adds that the "wonderfully uplifting and touching" book is full of "wry humour".

Kirkus Reviews notes "Many people's uncharitable reactions to their homeless state—one would think they were lepers"; but that there were equally often "unexpected gestures of generosity". It comments that Winn's prose is at the outset "mercurial", taking time to "settle down and achieve simplicity and clarity of observation". The review expresses doubt about the credibility of some of the "vignettes" describing coastal nature and "the enchantment of moments in the wild", but suggests that these will be forgotten as the reader comes to "admire the couple's fortitude and resiliency."

Canon Mike D. Williams of Exeter Cathedral writes that the book is made by the quality of its writing, and the stories of the people that Ray and Moth meet: "Those who treat them as tramps, those that show kindness and generosity." He notes how Moth several times shares his "meagre rations" with other hungry and homeless wanderers. The book is, he writes, about the coast path and its people, but its central theme is "the courage, resilience and grit of two people who, out of love for each other, keep putting one foot in front of the other."

Awards

The Salt Path was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize, and the 2018 Costa Book Awards in the biography category. The Costa judges described it as "An absolutely brilliant story that needs to be told about the human capacity to endure and keep putting one foot in front of another." In May 2019 The Salt Path won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize. The book was a Sunday Times bestseller in 2018. In September 2019 it was the number one bestselling book in UK independent bookstores.

Adaptations

In 2023, a film adaptation of the same name began filming with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles.

References

Sources

• Winn, Raynor (2018). The Salt Path. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-2413-4964-9.
• Winn, Raynor (2018). The Salt Path. Penguin Books. ISBN 978-1-405-93718-4.

External links

• BBC News: How crisis led couple up the coastal path