For long-distance walker and author Raynor Winn, the natural world is an intrinsic part of who she is. Winn found her passion for distance walking several years back, after she and her husband Moth lost their home and had nowhere to go. At the time, their 600-mile walk, memorialized in Winn’s first book The Salt Path, was life affirming, a journey that provided them with direction and purpose.
“To walk on the path means that you've got a direction and a purpose and a route forwards,” explains Winn. “That is what we were looking for — something that gave us a route forward in life.”
Extreme walking also surprised them both with one unexpected benefit: that Moth’s symptoms from a rare and terminal degenerative disease subsided with each day on the trail.
Eight years later, Moth’s symptoms returned. Would another extreme walk help him, or would it be too much?
Apprehensive, Winn says they had to, “face some really difficult choices … We could have just sat on the sofa and let it be, and I could have just cared for him as his health declined. Or we could say [that] hard as it is, difficult as it is, we have to change the way we are living, because that is how you're going to survive.”
The path they chose to walk was the Cape Wrath Trail in the north of Scotland — one of the harshest terrains in Britain, noted for its striking topography.
“We walked through some incredible landscape and incredible weather where we were in the sun one day and a foot of snow the next,” she recalls.
Remarkably, ever so slowly, Moth’s symptoms from corticobasal degeneration, a Parkinson’s-like disease, began to improve.
Being surrounded by nature and eating a restrictive diet while walking these extreme distances seemed to change something within Moth. Long days spent together on a path provided hope, inspiration, and transformation, which Winn says stems from their ability to embrace the moment.
“Whether it's a great moment or whether it's the really darkest, deepest, hardest moments of life — that’s where you find something in yourself that you've probably never recognized,” she says. “That's where the transformation lies.”
Winn shares their incredible journey in her latest book Landlines: The Remarkable Story of a Thousand-Mile Journey Across Britain. Along with her keen observations on nature, friendship, extinction, and illness, her message is one of hope, perseverance and, above all, taking that first step — “the absolute joy of being on that path, putting one foot in front of another.”
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In Landlines: The Remarkable Story of a Thousand-Mile Journey Across Britain, author Raynor Winn talks about the transformative power of the natural world: “We went in separate to the landscape, but we came out as the landscape; as part of it.” Raynor Winn. Photo by Robert Darch