Within the same week, Raynor Winn and her husband Moth lost their farmhouse home, after losing a court case, and Moth was diagnosed with an incurable terminal disease. So they decided to walk the South-West Coast path which is 630 miles along the north coast of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall from Minehead to Land's End and then along the south coast of Cornwall, Devon and Dorset from Land's End to Poole. They are incredibly short of money, trying to survive on £48 per week, so that they are having to camp wild. They often go hungry, they are almost always wet, they are often cold. Moth is frequently in pain from his disease. They walk half as fast as they expected. Being homeless they are often shunned. In every way, their decision to do this walk is crazy. And yet, being so close to nature enables them to appreciate life and thus come to terms with Moth's imminent death.
A book that is full of humour and compassion, with some brilliant descriptions of nature.
It starts with a life-and-death moment in the middle of a night as their beach-pitched tent is in danger of being overwhelmed by the incoming tide: "The man, who only two months earlier had struggled to put on his coat without help, was standing on a beach in his underpants holding an erected tent above his head with a rucksack on his back saying, run." (Prologue)
Perhaps the thing that keeps it going all the way is the audacity of their daring and the endurance in the face of so much suffering.
Selected quotes:
- "We're not as ninja as we used to be." (Ch 3)
- "We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show." (Ch 13)
- "Between morning and early evening, camping spots abound. After six, they're nowhere to be seen." (Ch 13)
- "Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? ... If the homeless of our own country were gathered in a refugee camp, or rode the seas in boats of desperation, would we open our arms to them?" (Ch 21)
- "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." (Ch 21)
- "The thought of a room in a house full of teenagers made me shrivel a little inside. I'd already done that and thankfully they grew up." (Ch 21)
- The Sea on our left by Shally Hunt who walks around the entire coastline of Great Britain
- A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor who walks from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople
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