The Salt Path memoir

A fake relic for a geo-pious age

I’m not one of the people who knew all along that The Salt Path story was not true. That’s because, when I saw it in the cinema, I didn’t even realise that it was meant to be true. And today I’m not sure if that makes me extra-perceptive or extra-dull.

I saw the movie a couple of weeks ago. At the outset I didn’t like movie versions of Raynor and Moth Winn very much, it was all a bit bleak, and I wondered whether the movie would make me care about them at all. I did come to care for them. The scriptwriters were clever and the cinematographers skilled. I cried at the small kindnesses shown by people to each other on the road, and when Raynor says Moth is her “home”.

I only realised that this was a “true story” when the credits rolled and update was given on the wild-camping couple. I was curious and bought the book, which I was finishing reading this week, at the same time as people were clicking share on Chloe Hadjimatheou’s exposé of the couple in The Observer.

Hadjimatheou uncovered a backstory for the couple that was different to the one in their memoir. Raynor (real name Sally Walker) allegedly stole £64,000 from her real estate agent boss, over a long period of time, and the couple lost their farm when they were forced to repay some of the amount. They also owned a property in France all along – not technically “homeless” – and Moth (real name Tim Walker) and his miraculous physical transformation do not ring true with medical experts.

Why do I feel conned by this? After all, it does appear that Raynor and Moth have endured some movie-and-memoir-worthy trials on the road. Maybe I’m embarrassed at how easily I fall for modern and miraculous pilgrim stories, packaged within a satisfying narrative arc. Maybe I’m sheepish at also wanting to have my own pilgrim story, telling people how I took “a narrow path alongside the busy world”, as Raynor says.

I have finished The Salt Path memoir now and am keen to do some narrative investigation. When and where was the Winn’s story crafted? On the road, or at home? During the wild-camping, or afterwards? Did their story change and develop over time? Did they steal bits from other people’s stories, and were the bits they stole from fiction or from real life or from both?

My working hypothesis is that the story began to be crafted on the road itself, as Raynor and Moth improvised explanations for their homelessness to fellow travellers on the South West Coast Path. Perhaps seeing and feeling that their precarious existence got the most sympathy from other backpackers and wild campers, they began to craft an identity that would resonate most strongly with these people, and a wider audience keen to live vicariously through these experiences. This meant cloaking themselves with a spirituality-for-the-road, a “geo-pious” spirituality: open-hearted to the plight of others, spare of means, and ecologically aware.

As a narrative aside, it’s ironic (don’t you think) that this new identity had to involve a change of name from “Walker” to something else. “Winn” now sounds a bit triumphalist. How do you “win” a long walk? The Salt Path suggests that the winning is in Moth’s miraculous overcoming of sickness and his re-energised sense of vocation. The Observer revelations imply that the prize for the walk was a book contract for Raynor and the opportunity to rewrite their history for substantial financial gain. Now that The Observer has published the exposé, are the Winns still winning?

Crafting a poetic identity

In The Salt Path an amusing narrative is interwoven through their initial travels, as Moth is continually mistaken for someone called “Simon”. The Winns accidentally enjoy some food and hospitality meant for this Simon, who is apparently famous on the path but not known to them.

The Winns only discover who Simon is after Moth earns them some money in Cornwall by busking:

On the way back to the campsite, we spotted a poster in a gallery window. Simon Armitage. A poet. Walking from Minehead to Land’s End, doing readings along the way. Doing one here in St Ives on Sunday. Free. Fully booked.

Moth and Raynor don’t think that Moth looks anything like the image of Armitage. But the Winn / Armitage memoirs cue us to realise that their hats probably looked similar. Raynor describes Moth’s “hemp” hat a few times, annoyed that she has forgotten to bring her own. Armitage also describes his hemp hat at length. He is self-conscious about the hat, given that “he doesn’t have a head for hats”, and “it’s made from a natural fibre which if not used by the hat manufacturer would have only ended up in an illegal cigarette and should help to ingratiate me with some of Devon and Cornwall’s more alternative communities.” That is, it is a hemp hat, like Moth’s. And Armitage’s hemp hat becomes a beacon for his literary fans on the road.

Moth’s busking involves a short burst of dramatic reading from his travel-worn copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf. He hastily concludes the show after he is asked to show his busking licence. A member of the audience tells Moth that Heaney has died only two weeks ago, and reassures Moth that his impromptu busking would be appreciated as a fitting “tribute” to Heaney, and he hopes that he is watching from the sky.

After the Beowulf reading, Raynor shares her own “tribute” to the poet Simon Armitage with Moth:

Seagulls, seagulls everywhere,
In my hair.
Pasties, pasties everywhere,
In the bird.

Moth, of course, tells Raynor that this is “complete crap” and “bollocks”, despite Raynor’s humorous protestation that it is “iambic heptameter”. Raynor’s “bollocks” poetry and her fake-humble protest reads ironically for the reader – because, indeed, she leans into the poetic in her descriptions of coastal ecology. And Moth’s joke that his perceived likeness to Armitage is because “maybe people are just drawn to my poetic nature” also reads as ironic and fake-humble.

It's also an ironic poetic counterpoint that sometimes Armitage seems to be phoning his walking experience in, in his literary way:

The tide rises and falls. The cliffs lift then drop. The hour hand of the sun arcs across the sky. The days come and go, so do the towns, villages and beaches, as do names and faces, bookshops, theatres, bunkhouses, back bedrooms and village halls. The miles pass. Slowly, but they do pass. And I press forward, each new step overtaking the last, and the earth rolls away underneath. It’s a treadmill, this journey, or a roller coaster along the coast, or a motion picture with emphasis on the motion, a film that keeps spooling on from scene to scene. Or it’s a book I’m reading or the book I’m writing, every day a new chapter, every word a footfall, the path like a sentence, a line of language always heading off into the distance.

Walking Away is Armitage’s second walking book: his first described a walking trip along the Pennine Way in northern England. Both walking trips involved the generous hospitality of literary connections, and the collection of money in a sock at the end of each poetry reading to help fund the journey. Armitage is self-consciously making a literary living with every step. The Winns, by contrast, distinguish themselves from the literary crowd that is following Armitage on the road- they declaim knowledge of who Armitage is – but connect themselves with ancient storytelling traditions and hone their own backstory on the road.

Reading the “Poets” chapter on first go made me assume that both Heaney and Armitage had died, but a Wikipedia search changed my mind about that. The concluding chapter for Armitage’s Walking Away does suggest that he is walking away from any more walking trips or walking memoirs. The Winns, by contrast, have continued to walk and continued to write about their walking.

Towards the end of the book Raynor describes Moth and his storytelling abilities, in Beowulf terms. This is the storytelling session that earns Raynor and Moth the offer of stable accommodation at the end of The Salt Path:

Over hot mugs of coffee Moth spun a story of golden summers spent under canvas, of changing weather unfolding around two people living wild in nature. Of a narrow path alongside the busy world, but as separate from it as if it were in another dimension. The woman, Anna, sat mesmerized, caught by his stories, spellbound as people always are. He could have been reading from Beowulf.

Raynor takes care to describe Moth’s copy of Beowulf as the “so-familiar plain dark blue cover with the red writing”. It has been in Moth’s backpack from the beginning of the journey. So, the busking session was definitely not an opportunistic literary “reading”, a way of exploiting tourist grief at the death of a much-loved poet. It was not a book picked up from a tourist or a bookshop at St Ives, the centre of culture on the South West Coast Path.

We, dear readers, know that the opportunity to earn money from busking with a dramatic reading from Seamus Heaney’s version of Beowulf was unexpected manna (pasties) from heaven, and an opportunity to regard the birds (seagulls), those opportunistic avians (watching from the sky) who also take their daily bread from unsuspecting tourists.

Simon Armitage’s memoir of walking the South West Coast Path, Walking Away, was published in 2015, three years before The Salt Path was published. But we know from Raynor’s tribute that she and Moth laughingly washed their hands of this poet while they were still on the road. So Armitage’s story would not have informed the Winns’ story. Readers can rest comfortably, at narrative ease, while the Winns laugh about it all. Raynor does not mention Armitage again.

The battle of the rhododendrons

Written into these memoirs is an idea of what is acceptably “wild” in the botanical landscape, and what is not. Armitage talks of

walking through miles of rampant rhododendron, high enough to make the path a tunnel at times, the trunks and branches beneath the leaves impenetrably dark and endlessly interlocked. Nothing grows beneath this stuff.

Armitage notes that there are signs of “brutal act of botanical cleansing”, but even so, “there are signs of recrudescence even among the hacked limbs and scorched earth, a vigorousness that looks as if it’s here to stay”. “Recrudescence” connotes the return of disease: a very attractive way of describing resilient regrowth.

By contrast, Raynor sings the praises of the rhododendron, and it provides a dense canopy that “protected” the couple as they walked through rain. Raynor salutes it as a plant that has actually belonged to this coastline, all along, even though most people regard it as an introduced species:

“Resilient and persecuted plants that, contrary to belief, lived in the UK millennia ago. Fossils have been found that prove they grew here before the last ice age, but native plant status is reserved for plants that flourished after the ice had receded. Reintroduced to the UK in the mid-eighteenth century, they rapidly colonized the countryside: a wave of migrants with rich, glossy evergreen leaves, bringing texture and colour to drab, grey, leafless British winters, followed by a stunning spring display of lush purple and mauve flowers cloaking the hills and forest undergrowth”.

Winn’s fondness for the rhododendron is similar to the way the weed “Paterson’s Curse” is referred to fondly in Australian novel The Battlers (1941). Kylie Tennant describes the walking travels of itinerant workers during the Great Depression, and there is a conversation on the road about Paterson’s Curse, which blooms attractively in the fields but is regarded as noxious by farmers. Like rhododendron, Paterson’s Curse was introduced to the countryside in order to provide exotic colour. Even though the weed has been “disowned” and regarded as alien and problematic, the “battlers” on the road find now the “unrepentant” weeds a source of inspiration:

‘I was looking at them flowers.’ The Stray had hardly greeted him. ‘What they called?’ She waved her hand at the purple flowers.

Snow gave them a disparaging glance. ‘Paterson’s Curse,’ he announced gloomily.

‘Geeze, it’s pretty!’ ‘That’s you all over.’

Snow was determined to find fault. ‘It’s a bloody weed. Sit there gawping at a weed that’s driven many a man off his land. Ain’t no use burnin’ it.’ He was rather glad to have something to talk about besides the fact that they were there together again, sitting in the old van, just as they had sat many times. ‘Some farmer’s daughter went out and picked a bunch of the stuff. Brought it home to stick in a vase. Chucked it out when it wilted, and of course it sprouts up lively. Next thing they knew they was fightin’ it like it was a fire. Ends by drivin’ them off the place.’

The flowers flared up from the ground unconquerable. The unrepentant gaiety of the weed, the burning blues and crimsons, set the hills glowing.

‘It’s a plant that’s struck it lucky,’ the Stray said thoughtfully. ‘It hasn’t got no right, but it’s there.’

The way that the Paterson’s curse flowers “set the hills glowing” is similar to the bold wall of of rhododendron flowers in their season, on the South West Coast Path. Even Armitage concedes that “the wall of blue and pink petals must be beautiful from the water when this stretch of the coast is in full flower, and surely visible from the coast of Wales”.

Some of that “unrepentant” tenacity is seen in the Winn’s determination to wild camp on the path, and their feeling that the landscape belongs to them, that it is in fact an extension of themselves. By aligning themselves with other “battlers” on the road, those who show tenacity despite having the cards of society stacked against them, the Winns gain our sympathy. They may have “no right” to wild camp, but the reader is positioned to cheer them on all the more in their illegal enterprise.

Raynor boasts that “we’d mastered wild camping, turning ‘leave no trace’ into a fine art”. Ironically, by writing this book she has left a massive narrative trace for others to follow. She and Moth can have a spiritual experience on a beach and then sneer at the “biblical invasion” of tourists, because a spiritual experience “wasn’t available after ten thirty”. But her memoir has set up the South West Coast for an invasion of wild campers with The Salt Path in their pocket. Moth travelled with a copy of Paddy Dillon’s guide in his pocket, and The Salt Path implies a reader who would take on the Winns as a replacement guide.

Gail Muller, who has written her own walking memoir, explains her frustration with wild camping on the South West Coast Path, how it disturbs fragile coastal ecologies and disrupts landholder care of the environment. The popularity of The Salt Path could indeed lead to a “biblical invasion” of salted tourists hitting the beach before ten thirty for their spiritual experience.

Woodlanders

As Raynor falls into illness and recovers, The Salted Path tells of a woodland interlude, where she and Moth are ushered into a secret community for respite. This community is precarious, their woodland home is under apparent threat: the couple is told that the authorities want to strip the pines so that the land can return to its indigenous heath.

The people in this woodland camp are mostly workers, but “part-time, insecure jobs, low wages, seasonal living that made it difficult to secure a rented home”. Raynor cultivates an audience that is similarly ready to be sympathetic towards a middle-aged homeless couple- victims of uncaring bureaucracy, incompetent court system and unscrupulous entrepreneurs. And a couple, she is at pains to remind us, who are not the “cliched” version of homeless, which she presents as addled with drugs and petty crime.

Their guide into this community, John, laments:

The pines have been here for so long. They’re as much a part of the landscape now as the old woods are. I know it’s too dark for much life in here, but there’s buzzards, they nest here every year, and foxes, badgers, woodcock, and sloe worms and adders in the heath at the edge and in the clearings. Where will the buzzards go? It’s their home.

There’s a literary angle to the drive to clear the pine forests- the indigenous heath is like what it would have been in “Thomas Hardy’s day”, although ironically they had forests then, too. As John says “Didn’t he write that book about forests? Woodlanders, that’s it. They can’t seem to see the beauty in what we have now”. Literature and storytelling shape contested views of the landscape – what is native, and what is exiled but has a right to return (indeed, Thomas Hardy wrote of The Return of the Native).

In 1976 Yi-Fu Tuan wrote an essay “geo-piety” for Geographies of the Mind to describe the spiritual bonds that humans experience with their terrestrial homes. He warned that there could be a darker side to this form of spirituality. When linked to a sense of homeland, it could also lead to an intense patrolling of who is “in” and who is “out”, a contested idea of who is “native” or indigenous. He warned that geo-piety needed to be located within a sense of reciprocity – an attitude of give and take with the environment, and tempered with compassion for peoples who have different attachments to the land, or who come from overseas.

In the Salt Path the Winns align themselves with a group of people- who they suggest are the deserving poor- and against landholders, governmental authority, and everyday tourists. The reader is on the Winn’s side as they struggle to find rental accommodation – they have no rental referees – and struggle to find employment – Raynor has not been in paid employment before. Except she has been in paid employment, working for a real estate agent in North Wales. And there seemed to be more take than give in that employment relationship.

Tortoises on the road

There are many pilgrim tropes at play in The Salt Path, so many allusions to spiritual experience on the road, to prophets and soothsayers with magical insight, that this memoir now feels laden with literary nods and winks along the path.

As Moth and Raynor are about to walk away from their house with their new backpacks, Raynor describes standing together “like a pair of stranded turtles”. Their strangest pilgrim experience is linked to another shelled creature: a tortoise. In chapter four their passage onwards is blocked by a blind man doing yoga, who foretells that:

You’ll see many thanks, amazing things, and suffer many setbacks, problems you think you can’t overcome. But you will overcome them, you’ll survive, and it will make you strong. And you’ll walk with a tortoise.

At the end of the memoir, Moth and Raynor do indeed see a man walking his pet tortoise, called Lettuce, in a customized dog harness, allowing it to eat the same on its walk. When they ask why the man couldn’t just put the tortoise in his front garden, the man says that he couldn’t do that to a “wild animal”.

The walking tortoise is a source of humour, and we are meant to eyeroll with the Winns – not another weird pilgrim experience, for the couple who are not pilgrims and who are wild camping.

There’s another tortoise on a walk in Armitage’s memoir. He uses figurative humour to describe his suitcase for the road, which is shuttled between towns on his behalf as he walks. It is a tortoise:

Lying flat on the carpet the stretched, overstuffed fabric of the lid forms a humped green dome, like the shell of one of those giant sea turtles bobbing around in the ocean or lumbering across a sandy beach, and with just enough phone signal to connect to Google Images I decide that the Galapagos tortoise, with its hemispherical carapace and five hundred pounds of body mass, is the most poetic comparison.

Moth and Raynor mouth “what!” as they the yoga practitioner prophesies about a tortoise on a leash. I think I was mouthing something similar as I read about Armitage’s Galapagos tortoise.

The Embezzler’s Tale

In The Canterbury Tales, a motley bunch of pilgrims introduce themselves to each other, and then commence a storytelling competition for the journey. Geoffrey Chaucer didn’t finish his work, so we don’t know who won this fourteenth century storytelling contest. The Pardoner gave it a good go: his tale was about greed and the discovery of unexpected pile of gold coins under a tree. The Pardoner had already let everyone know in the prologue that he was pretty content with his own storytelling abilities and his ability to spin tales about fake relic to extract money from open-hearted, guileless pilgrims. He was also pretty good at preaching poverty while raking in large sums.

Raynor Winn has spun us a tale for the road. She is not like the Pardoner, who is not backward in coming forward with his problematic backstory, his prologue. We expect pilgrimages to change us, to make us face our true selves. The Salt Path and its controversy forces us to face our propensity to spin tales for the road, and to create a “true self” that is not true. In fact, we love to do this, it’s a uniquely human experience. The Winns have made money by doing it.

And so: now that we know that The Salt Path is not The Tale of the Homeless, but rather The Embezzler’s Tale, will we keep this fake relic in our pockets for protection on the journey?