30 May 2025

Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2019 edition of Walk magazine.

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How do you know when a walk has been the walk of your life? For many, it has been from the day the walk starts, at the beginning  of a long-anticipated and prepared-for journey. But my walk was neither anticipated nor prepared for. 

I was hiding under the stairs when I decided to walk. I hadn’t carefully considered walking 630 miles with a rucksack on my back. I hadn’t thought about how I could afford to do it, or that I’d be wild camping for nearly 100 nights, or what I’d  do afterwards. It just seemed like the best response to the hammering of the bailiffsat the front door.

It was the end of one of those weeks that happen to someone else. A financial dispute with a lifetime friend had led to a court case that lasted for three years, culminating in my husband, Moth, and me being served with an eviction notice from our home of 20 years. Two days later, a doctor sat on the edge of his desk and told Moth that he had a rare neurodegenerative disease, for which there was no cure and no treatment. He was going to die. My world and all that kept me stable slipped from beneath my feet. But as the bailiffs waited to change the locks, to shut us out of our old lives, I spotted a book in a packing case that I had read decades before, about a man who walked the South West Coast Path with his dog (500 Mile Walkies by Mark Wallington). In that moment, I saw the chance to follow a line on a map, and we desperately needed a map, something to show us the way.

Within weeks of losing our home, we got off the bus in Minehead, Somerset, and very quickly found that backpacking when you’re 50 isn’t the same as when you’re 20. The first days took their toll on muscles and joints, but we had a greater problem than a few aches and pains. The small amount of money we had to live on each week rarely bought enough food, and very quickly hunger came to overshadow any other physical problem. 

Despite that, every day we packed the tent and walked on, homeless, ill and hungry, and slowly the calmness of the open horizon began to seep in.

Wild camping allowed us to live as one with the incredible natural environment we walked through. We were drawn on, across rain-soaked headlands, sun-beaten beaches, deep wooded valleys and sheer exposed cliffs, trapped between the domestic world on one side and the endless movement of the sea on the other, in a strip  of wilderness that became our home. The path follows an ancient weathered landscape rich in wildlife that, like us, was driven to live at the edge of the land. Opening our tent flaps each morning, we never knew what we would see outside:  deer sleeping by the tent, thousands of ladybirds hatching into their first flight, or headlands appearing one by  one as the sun rose through a foggy morning.

We began the walk in a state of anxiety and despair, fearing what the future might hold. But as we walked, we realised those thoughts were slipping away, and each step became the reason to take the next and the next. We reached Land’s End in a howling gale of horizontal rain and driving sand. Every other walker had abandoned the cliffs and found safety, leaving us alone at the edge of the Atlantic. We had only a Mars bar and a few £1 coins left to sustain us, yet as we sat in our tent with just two sheets of wet nylon between us and Canada, we knew what our walk was giving us. A life when we thought ours was over and the strength to look to the horizon with hope.

That was five years ago. We now live in Cornwall, where  the coast path passes the front gate. Moth and I still walk  on the cliffs every day, and although his health isn’t as good as it was, he has finished  a degree and has just graduated in his cap and gown.  

Raynor Winn is a long-distance walker and writer. Her book about the 630-mile journey, The Salt Path (£9.99, Penguin), was shortlisted for the 2018 Costa Biography Award.