Reading: The Salt Path
Apr. 4th, 2020 11:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
white_hartIn 2013, Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, lost the farm in Wales that had been both their home and their livelihood as the result of an unwise investment in a friend's failed business, just days after Moth was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative brain condition. With their only income a small weekly tax credit payment and little prospect of finding somewhere to rent, they bought a second-hand tent on eBay and set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path, wild camping along the way.
The Salt Path is Raynor Winn's story of their walk. I'd put the book on my wish list a while ago because I read a Guardian interview with her and was looking out for books about walking that weren't going to fall into the Lone Enraptured Male category, but I was a bit worried that it might be more misery memoir than walking book, but I needn't have worried. Winn doesn't shy away from the reality of their situation, two among the many hidden homeless who the statistics overlook, sleeping on friends' floors or camping in the wild rather than sleeping on the streets, or from the difficulties of ekeing out a life on so little; they are often cold, wet and hungry, and there's one awful moment where she drops a handful of coins and they watch money they can ill-afford to lose rolling down a drain and being picked up by a child, but her tone is self-deprecating rather than self-pitying, managing to find a wry humour in even the lowest points of the walk. There are other moments of humour, too; I was particularly entertained by a sequence where Moth is repeatedly mistaken for Simon Armitage, who was doing his "modern troubador" walk along the South West Coast Path at the same time, despite looking nothing like him. And although the Winns frequently encounter people who draw away from them on discovering they are homeless, they also encounter genuine kindness and generosity from people they meet along the way.
Although loss and homelessness form the backdrop to the Winns' journey, The Salt Path is still, first and foremost, a book about the walk. Winn's prose is gorgeous and lyrical and and vividly evokes the wild landscapes of the coastal path, and she manages to convey perfectly the way a long walk can simultaneously be both a moment-by-moment slog and an uplifting experience. I loved it, and would definitely class it as one of my very favourite walking books; it was also a particular joy to read something with such a strong sense of the natural world in a week when the Covid-19 lockdown has meant that I'm unable to get out into nature myself, and I would recommend it to anyone who is also missing nature at the moment.
The Salt Path is Raynor Winn's story of their walk. I'd put the book on my wish list a while ago because I read a Guardian interview with her and was looking out for books about walking that weren't going to fall into the Lone Enraptured Male category, but I was a bit worried that it might be more misery memoir than walking book, but I needn't have worried. Winn doesn't shy away from the reality of their situation, two among the many hidden homeless who the statistics overlook, sleeping on friends' floors or camping in the wild rather than sleeping on the streets, or from the difficulties of ekeing out a life on so little; they are often cold, wet and hungry, and there's one awful moment where she drops a handful of coins and they watch money they can ill-afford to lose rolling down a drain and being picked up by a child, but her tone is self-deprecating rather than self-pitying, managing to find a wry humour in even the lowest points of the walk. There are other moments of humour, too; I was particularly entertained by a sequence where Moth is repeatedly mistaken for Simon Armitage, who was doing his "modern troubador" walk along the South West Coast Path at the same time, despite looking nothing like him. And although the Winns frequently encounter people who draw away from them on discovering they are homeless, they also encounter genuine kindness and generosity from people they meet along the way.
Although loss and homelessness form the backdrop to the Winns' journey, The Salt Path is still, first and foremost, a book about the walk. Winn's prose is gorgeous and lyrical and and vividly evokes the wild landscapes of the coastal path, and she manages to convey perfectly the way a long walk can simultaneously be both a moment-by-moment slog and an uplifting experience. I loved it, and would definitely class it as one of my very favourite walking books; it was also a particular joy to read something with such a strong sense of the natural world in a week when the Covid-19 lockdown has meant that I'm unable to get out into nature myself, and I would recommend it to anyone who is also missing nature at the moment.
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Date: 2020-04-04 05:25 pm (UTC)