Hiking to happiness
Bailiffs at the door, losing their home, reeling from a terminal diagnosis . . . how one couple pulled on their walking boots and turned their lives around
RAYNOR WINN and her husband Moth were both crouching together ‘ like scared mice’ in the cupboard under the stairs of their ancient Welsh farmhouse, listening to the bailiffs outside rattling the window catches, when they decided to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path: all the way from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset.
Five days earlier, a judge had decreed the seizure of their home in payment for debts accrued by a friend’s business in which they had recklessly invested. all their income came from paying guests, so their business was gone, too.
Their savings had been swallowed up by three years of solicitors’ fees after their case was deemed ‘too complex’ to qualify for legal aid.
Their two children, away at university, could barely keep themselves afloat, let alone support their parents.
The day after the court judgment, Moth, a master plasterer, was diagnosed with a rare, terminal condition (corticobasal degeneration, or CBD), which had already weakened him and was now expected to destroy his mind and body within six to eight years. The consultant told him that there was no cure, only pain relief.
on that summer day in 2013, broke, homeless and dying, Moth clung to his wife in fear, anger and denial.
Logic told them that they should look for work and a place to rent, but the judgment had destroyed their credit rating and the council said they were a low priority for housing unless Moth was going to die within the year.
Then raynor spotted an old hikers’ guide on top of a box she had packed. ‘ We could just walk?’ she said. ‘Together?’ Moth replied. ‘always.’ So began a long journey of unaccustomed privation and surprising revivification. When they walked out of the home where they had raised their children, raynor and Moth had just £320 in the bank and £48 a week in tax credits to sustain them.
They blew the remaining cash on lightweight rucksacks, a tent and sleeping bags, and hopped on a bus to Minehead. T
hey planned to keep the budget low by living on boiled noodles, with the occasional chip shop treat.
Wild camping is illegal in england and Wales (apart from parts of Dartmoor), so the Winns quickly learned to get their tent up late and pack it all away, without leaving a trace, before the early morning dog walkers arrived to tut.
They soon worked out that they must keep their story to themselves, after realising that fellow hikers only found the long, wild walk inspirational when they believed it was a lifestyle choice.
as soon as they identified the Winns as ‘losers’, people winced and dropped them.
in addition to finding themselves on the wrong side of the social tracks, the Winns discovered that daily hiking in your 50s is a lot harder than you remember it was in your 20s. raynor ached all over and yearned for a bath.
Moth, meanwhile, after an initial struggle, found his symptoms were strangely reduced by the daily slog.
eventually, the pair found their ‘tired, soft and pale’ bodies had become ‘lean and tanned, with a refound muscularity that we’d thought we had lost for ever.
‘our hair was fried and falling out, our nails broken, clothes worn to a thread, but we were alive. not just breathing through
the thirty thousand or so days between life and death, but knowing each minute as it passed, swirling around in an exploration of time.’
Throughout their journey, they were confused by strangers warmly greeting Moth as ‘Simon!’
On one occasion, a wealthy wine merchant invited the scruffy couple to his ‘picture-perfect’ holiday home, let them use the shower, then seated them at the table with his glamorous wife, nanny and PA, poured the wine and served lashings of lasagne.
As Raynor finished her third drink while listening to the merchant, she realised Moth had gone.
She found him in another room, topless, as the PA massaged his back and the nanny rubbed oil into his feet. They were all asking for a poem.
A bewildered Moth gave them a few lines of ‘The boy stood on the burning deck’ and everybody called him a ‘corker!’
Towards the end of their adventure, they learned the poet Simon Armitage was hiking the same route as them that summer, offering recitals in return for food and accommodation. He missed out on some fine wine and a massage.
At the end of their journey, a woman offered them a home in Cornwall. Moth retrained to teach his plastering skills and Raynor began a career as a nature writer.
Homelessness, she writes, ‘had taken every material thing that I had and left me stripped bare, a blank page at the end of a partly written book. It had also given me a choice, either to leave that page blank or to keep writing the story with hope. I chose hope.’