A journey from rock bottom to revelation and beyond
Author of The Salt Path admits she would drink tea with the man who left her and her husband bankrupt
THE author of award-winning memoir
The Salt Path has admitted she would “love to share a cup of tea” with the man whose business advice left her homeless.
Raynor Winn, 57, and her husband, Moth, 60, lost everything when an investment they had made in a friend’s company years earlier proved disastrous, leaving them bankrupt.
At the same time that bailiffs came knocking at the door of their Welsh farmhouse to take everything they owned, Mr Winn was diagnosed with terminal brain disease and told he had very little time left to live.
Plunged to rock bottom, Mrs Winn admits that the experience would have finished many marriages.
But rather than allow themselves to be consumed by despair, the Winns took to the great outdoors, walking the 630 miles of the South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall.
Along the way, they learnt to rethink their values and Mr Winn managed to stave off his illness.
His wife, whose subsequent account of their adventure won the Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize and was shortlisted for a Costa, revealed she could now envisage coming face to face with the former friend whose business deal had thrown their life off kilter.
“‘I’d love to share a cup of tea and say, “Look where life’s gone,’” she told
The Telegraph Magazine. Mrs Winn revealed that through losing it all, she had learnt to rethink her middle-class ideas around success. “I don’t need ‘ownership’ any more,” she said.
“When you have lost just about every material thing you have, the sense of what they represent in your life changes.
“The moment you chose those Alevel subjects, or you go to university or you take that first job, in your mind you’ve got a little vision of what the future will be, and where that’s going to lead you and how that’s going to form your life.
“For some, that works and you follow that path you made for yourself but then when, like us, all that gets taken away, all of it, all that structure you have created – and for us it was decades in the creation – you take away that framework, then you have to reinvent how you live.
“But there’s huge freedom in that as well because it gives you an opportunity to say, ‘OK, I’m just going to press the reset button and I’m going to start again’. And that’s how it felt for us.”
She also put Mr Winn’s continuing good health down to being in the natural environment. “(Living in nature) is never going to cure Moth, but it does hold him on a plateau for a while,” she said.
“So if I had to pick up my rucksack again tomorrow and go out again, I would. Because (helping his health) is the most important thing that’s come from all of this.”
On reading The Salt Path, a man who owned a remote cider farm in Cornwall but whose dream of living there had faded, contacted the Winns via Twitter to ask if they would like to live there.
It is where Mrs Winn wrote her second book, The Wild Silence, and where the couple are now planning their next big walk.
The full interview is in today’s The Telegraph Magazine.