Photograph: FlixPix/Alamy
A few days after Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, had their Welsh farm repossessed owing to a failed investment, Moth learned he had a rare and incurable neurodegenerative condition. With their world upended and nowhere to live, the couple decided there was only one course of action: to walk.
Their plan was to follow the South West Coast Path, a hiking trail taking them from Minehead in Somerset, along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, around Land’s End and Lizard Point, then back along Cornwall’s south coast, south Devon and ending in Poole in Dorset. The 630-mile walk, taking in secluded beaches and coves, wild moorland and quiet hamlets and coastal towns, is equivalent to climbing Mount Everest four times over. Armed with the essentials – clothes, a tent, sleeping bags, endless packets of dried noodles – they would be “sleeping wild, living wild, working our way through every painful action that had brought us here, to this moment”.
