Why was The Salt Path a bestseller?

Raynor Winn’s account of the South West Coast Path was published in paperback in 2019, five years after the author and Moth her husband, completed the gruelling 630-mile hike. There were several particular circumstances to their adventure.

The first was debt accidentally incurred on their smallholding in northern Wales that resulted in the property’s repossession. The second was the partner’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration, a terminal disease affecting both body and mind. Having neither property, nor health, nor money between them the couple made the decision to go ‘on the road’, though the road chosen was an arduous one.

They had had the option ‘staying put’ at a local campsite, but ‘the best offers we had from a campsite was eighty pounds a week, far more than we could afford’, so the solution was to be ‘wild camping’. In this scenario the couple’s income would be through basic benefits paid through to their bank account and drawn out weekly, while accommodation, it was hoped, would be free. There is a certain logic to keeping moving to avoid persecution by landowners and other authorities if one has no fixed abode – settling in the late evening and then breaking camp in the early morning, the possibility of detection is limited. These were campers too, who left no trace. However, apart from rediscovery among her books of one called Five Hundred Mile Walkies, and the recall of the excitement it had provided about the coastal path long before, there is nothing to account for Winn’s decision to take up long-distance walking herself.

Nor is there material as to her previous experience of the activity. The pair are presented as naïve and ingenu. Their sleeping-bags are cheap lightweights and do not provide insulation on the cold nights they spend on the exposed headlands. They choose to spend their limited money on fast food which fails both to satisfy and to meet energy needs. And yet there is no mention of their boots. For all Winn bemoans the blisters and aches of the journey, we are in the dark regarding this most-crucial of items. She made a big saving by buying a £38 dome tent on eBay; I doubt they would have been allowed such economies with footwear and my guess is they did it properly-shod.

The Salt Path is, like most or all travel-writing, quite difficult to verify. There would be no reason to doubt that the journey was made, in 2014, as stated. Yet the detail, separate from the route itself, could have been made up. Granted is the writer’s freedom to embellish: she is writing, after all, aptly to entertain, to provide value. Whether her encounters with other hikers, holidaymakers and homeless (as she effectively was) actually happened, or whether they were interjected for the sake of narrative, we do not know. Suffice it to say that these figures are there to provide voices of disheartenment, there to discourage the pilgrims from their path, to break their resolve and nullify their effort. More trenchant, and credible, doubts come from within. She constantly questions her position – cold, wet and exhausted – and its futility in the face of winter coming on and the impossibility of camping and thus seeing out the season. Then there are the wider matters that follow on from the journey’s completion. Having lost both property and occupation, what, at the age of fifty, to do with the rest of her life? Here she joins her host of empty-nester readers to whom such questions are familiar ones. What is life for, once you have shot your bolt, given your best, passed on your genes – she, through The Salt Path, has resolved the problem only temporarily.

A ‘picaresque’ novel would use a new location to generate a new short story. In such fiction, from each encounter the hero emerges, probably the winner but perhaps not unscathed. Winn’s episodes usually result in epiphanous remarks, such as the pointless obsession of humanity with technology and travel in ignorance of the natural world on their doorstep, or the hard hearted-ness of those who own towards the ‘have-nots’. These accounts are never wholly downbeat though, because they are swiftly followed by records of generosity or regard for nature, such as the old man they meet who watches each year for the return of a peregrine falcon. The book though, largely deals with the effect of the journey on herself, as the poor diet, discomfort and adverse weather take their toll.

Humour permeates the account, as it must, because serious travel has a serendipity quality where the unexpected must turn up. Winn follows Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods in making comedy from other hikers who reappear on points on her route; she also makes her travelogue serve as a historical guide, writing up points on the route in a jaunty or regretful way. Paul Theroux though, in the 1980s, in The Kingdom by the Sea, used a walking/bus tour of Britain’s coast to provide a snapshot of the British people of the time. Winn has no such ambitions and neither is she strong in taking up the cause of the homeless or the country people dispossessed through second-home ownership. They get due mention but this is a comfortable read, without political enquiry. Well, she does not announce such commentary so the reader should not carp. A more prominent omission is her full experience of the alienation of the traveller. There are several instances of the couple’s reluctance to admit to homelessness but the spiritual disorientation is not explored; it is terminated in a renewed identity with ‘nature’. There is indeed some fine nature-writing; my impression is that it is used as a novelist’s device to bring on some reconciliation to the awful fate they have suffered in losing their farm. It is the absorption in the wider nature, represented by cliff, seabirds and ocean, that brings closure.

So. A certain compliance with a middle-aged readership looking for a redeeming story. It’s there in bucketloads through Moth’s at-least partial recovery as a result of the walk. That is for people who drink the waters and explore herbal infusions. What I found having direct influence on my life was the decision to forsake comfort for the unknown. To me, this is Jane Eyre, walking out on an impossible situation with Mr Rochester, her destiny to be on the wild moorland, where her survival will be in doubt. Raynor and Moth Winn have each other as they encounter the possibility of death – and this is nothing if not a love-story – but it is the tale of human courage that holds the reader, and finds recognition in the heart.