The Salt Path: A Memoir

"There are lots of reasons why I think it was a hit. It’s a story of jeopardy: of losing your home, and of potentially losing your life partner to terminal illness. Because so much is in the balance, it reads like a thriller. It’s a page-turner. And it’s so immersive you can taste the sea as you read it. And it has humour and tenderness. It’s the sort of book that people who wouldn’t normally read travel or nature writing read. Recently I was taking proofs of my book around bookshops in southern England last week in anticipation of my book launch. I was in one Waterstones, talking to the bookshop owner, and this woman came up and said, ‘Your book sounds so interesting. I’m into nature writing now, because I read The Salt Path .’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Again, this is a book that defies easy categorisation. It’s travel, nature, memoir. It was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing and it won the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize for first authors over 50. It’s an inversion of the traditional quest narrative, because The Salt Path is about two people in a desperate situation, with nowhere to go. They’re on an anti-quest—they’ve just got to go, whether they want to or not. If you had to make the elevator pitch, you’d say: in the same week, she lost her home, her business, and her husband. Moth is told by his doctor not to do anything strenuous—‘don’t climb stairs!’—but the bailiffs are knocking at the door. It sounds very high concept, but it’s real. So they get their backpacks, Paddy Dillon’s walking guide to the 630-mile South West Coast Path , and they just walk. They’ve got nothing else to do. So the book is about finding home when you have no home. It’s about homelessness as well—how the homeless are treated. When they were walking, if people thought they were homeless, they’d be shunned. But if they changed the narrative and said, ‘we’ve sold our home and decided to go on a life-changing walk’, people would say, ‘how inspirational’. The same facts, but a different perception. It’s funny and warm. And she didn’t write as she went along, she just made notes in the margins of Paddy Dillon’s guidebook. Then she wrote them up for Moth because he was losing his memory, and her daughter said, ‘Mum, you must do something with this, it’s good.’ Winn thought she meant bind it in a proper binder, but her daughter meant she should get it published. She sent it out, an agent got straight back, and Penguin published it. It’s like a dream come true. Cheryl Strayed is similar in many ways. She was reaching rock bottom because of drug addiction , and losing her mother. Readers live that kind of jeopardy vicariously, without having to live it themselves. So that’s part of the appeal. And that’s true of all great travel literature too—readers travel through the eyes of the author. In her latest book , Raynor Winn walks the Cape Wrath Trail, and meets people who say they are there because they read some book by a woman called Raynor Winn—they don’t recognise her—and she doesn’t say, hey, that’s me. Her book has inspired people to walk, even though in The Salt Path she was walking because she had to, not through choice. Those young men like Laurie Lee and Patrick Leigh Fermor didn’t have much money, but there’s less sense of jeopardy. But there is that same sense of freedom, in not needing very much to be able to do this—to walk out with a backpack, all your possessions on your back, and not needing anything else. In my book, Will Parsons , who created the ‘Old Way’, is the guy who inspired me. I got to know about him years ago when he and two mates set out and walked around Britain with just their backpacks—nowhere to go, nowhere to stay. They started singing to earn a bit of money, like medieval troubadours. They walked around the country for months. You can do that when you’re 20. When you’re older, it’s harder, you’ve got responsibilities. So seeing other people doing it makes you feel that freedom again. Journeying on foot is as old as time. And people still like reading about it."