“I’m not really sure why I’m here, lying in a bin-bag on the side of a hill, but I’m strangely glad that I am,” writes Raynor Winn, part of the way through her latest walking odyssey with her husband, Moth. She won’t be the only one glad. With her previous books, The Salt Path and The Wild Silence, having sold more than a million copies, Winn’s fans are legion and they won’t be disappointed by Landlines. Its pages offer the same potent blend of big themes (the climate crisis, extinction, migration, food security, homelessness, terminal illness, friendship) illuminated by intimate details, small observations, and a sort of magic as simple and complex as love itself. I’ve never met Ray or Moth, but it’s hard not to feel I’d know them at a glance, even from a great distance, by the comfortable glow of their old and intricate partnership, fray-edged and worn to exquisite imperfection.
The story of Landlines is another leap of faith, another long walk. Some things have changed: Ray and Moth no longer pass unrecognised, they are no longer homeless, they no longer have to survive on the most meagre of trail rations, but the shadow of Moth’s illness – a degenerative condition known as corticobasal degeneration – has not gone away. In fact, it has encroached further, as the doctors said it would, albeit more slowly than anyone expected. After a relapse and a grim consultation, they do what they have done before in the face of disaster, and hit the trail. Not just any trail, but the toughest and wildest Britain has to offer: the Cape Wrath. I’ll resist spoilers, but it doesn’t go according to plan.
