Worthing show commemorates an epic walk in heartbreaking circumstances

Ten years ago, Raynor and her husband walked the SW Coast Path in the most adverse and heartbreaking of circumstances. The story became the book The Salt Path, which was translated into multiple languages and is now becoming a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs to be released in the autumn. In the meantime, Raynor returns to the project as a prose and music collaboration with The Gigspanner Big Band.

Raynor explains: “It began with the journey. My husband Moth and myself had just been served an eviction notice from our home of 20 years. We had been living in this beautiful place in the hills of Wales. It had been a ruin and the roof was falling in but we spent 20 years of our lives living there and rebuilding it but then there was a financial dispute and we were served this eviction notice and they gave us a week to pack 20 years of our lives into boxes and get out. And it was during that week that my husband had what he thought was a routine hospital appointment. In fact he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease. He had a terminal diagnosis.”

The great news however is that he is still here and a huge part of the reason is what happened next. As they were leaving they saw a book about walking the South West coast path and that's precisely what they did: “We walked the 630 miles of the coast path from Minehead around the coast to Poole. It took us months and for us it represented our salvation in the end. At that point in our lives there was no hope and there was no future. We had become homeless in our 50s and Moth was suffering from this incredibly life-limiting disease for which we had been told there was no cure and no treatment. But by walking it felt that we were taking back some sort of control. It felt that there was safety in it. I have always felt a close connection to the natural world and there was something about that that helped us both, just living wild. We wild-camped the whole way. We were living on about £30 a week which doesn't go far in the south-west!

“But the weird thing is – and it became the book that I wrote, The Salt Path – but unexpectedly during the journey Moth’s health started to improve in ways that we were told were just not possible. He had been struggling to put his coat on without help when we were at home but in the end he walked 630 miles with a rucksack on his back. Two years after we had finished the walk I decided that I would write up the notes that we had written in the margins of the guidebook that we had and just to try to capture that time which was such a special time. When we stopped walking his health started to degenerate again but we did a thousand miles up to Scotland and back and we have just walked the Thames Path and he is still here.

“That's the great thing about walking. You think that you're going to think things through, but you don't. But walking is just a fantastic way to find your own balance. We are part of the natural world and when we realise that we do find balance.”

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