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SALT PATH
We walked 630 miles & lived in a tent after losing our home – now our life has been made into film with Gillian Anderson
The Salt Path is adapted from Ray’s book of the same title, which sold more than a million copies
WHEN a dog knocked Ray Winn’s last nine pounds from her hands, she desperately scrabbled down a drain trying to salvage the dropped coins.
But rather than helping her, the pet’s female owner poked Ray and grumbled, “We don’t have drunken tramps like you here. Get up.”
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It was the ultimate humiliation for the mum-of-two, who became homeless after a court repossessed the Welsh farm home she lovingly renovated with her husband Moth.
The couple, who made their living running holiday accommodation from the property, were left with nothing after an investment turned sour.
So with nowhere to go, they decided to wild camp as they walked 630 miles along the South West coast of England, from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset, in 2013.
To make matters worse, in the same week they lost their home, Moth was diagnosed with a rare and fatal neurological condition called corticobasal degeneration (CBD), which impaired his movement.
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Yet they set out determined to cover a distance which was the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest three times.
Miraculously, Moth, 64, who had been given just six years to live at the start of the journey, felt fitter by the end of it and still goes out for walks 12 years on.
‘People recoiled’
Now, their incredible story of survival has been turned into a movie starring X-Files actress Gillian Anderson as Ray and Harry Potter actor Jason Isaacs as her husband.
Called The Salt Path, it is adapted from 62-year-old Ray’s book of the same title, which sold more than a million copies.
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Sitting in the far more comfortable surroundings of a central London hotel, Ray says: “I hadn’t really thought about homelessness until we came to the idea of walking that path.
“We did start out by being quite honest and saying, ‘We’ve lost our house and we’ve got nowhere to go, so we’re just walking’.
Inside Gillian Anderson's 'Pleasure Empire'
“And people actually physically recoiled. It was shocking because, just a few weeks earlier, I’d been living an ordinary, standard life.”
Recalling the woman who called her a “tramp” in a seaside town along the way, Ray says: “For a moment I didn’t know who she was talking to.
"Then I realised it was me.
“Just those few weeks earlier, she was the sort of person I might have been welcoming into our holiday accommodation, but now she had a completely different view of me.”
Ray and Moth’s story is one of sticking together through thick and thin.
The couple, originally from the West Midlands, met in a college canteen when she was 18 and he was 20.
They had two children, Tom and Rowan, and bought an old farm in Wales, which they spent 20 years doing up.
Part of the property was turned into holiday lets, which became the pair’s main income.
But the decision to invest in a friend’s company left them with nothing.
After a three-year court battle, a judge decided all the couple’s worldly goods, including their home, should be repossessed in order to help pay debts.
All their savings had been spent on lawyers’ fees and they had just £115 left in the bank.
Then, in a cruel twist, a couple of days later Moth received a diagnosis for the mysterious pain he’d been suffering.
Doctors revealed he had CBD, which normally carries a life expectancy of six to nine years. He had already been ill for six.
Ray recalls: “We could not take it in, because someone who had lived such a physical, active, vital life to be told that he had this dreadful degenerative illness, was almost impossible to take on board, that it could happen to him, to us.
When we received Moth’s diagnosis, it was as if the future melted away as well
Ray
"I had been with him my whole adult life. I had never for one second envisioned life without him.”
The couple asked the council for accommodation, but claim they were told Moth’s condition did not merit it.
Ray explains: “We couldn’t prove that he would die in 12 months, so there was no accommodation available.”
The couple almost lost hope. Ray says: “It felt as if life had just ended, as if everything had been wiped out from beneath us.
"And that was simply losing the house.
“When we received Moth’s diagnosis, it was as if the future melted away as well.”
Fortunately, their children had already left home, so they only had each other to worry about.
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And as the bailiffs rapped on the door, Ray spotted among their boxes of belongings a book called 500 Mile Walkies, about a man who completed the South West Coast Path.
She suggested they attempt the same adventure.
However, the pair quickly realised that living in a tent out of despair rather than choice made them social lepers.
And they faced a struggle to get by on just £40 a week, meaning they had to ration their food carefully and would forage for berries and mushrooms.
Their basic meals included dried food such as rice or pasta, with tinned tuna an occasional treat.
But Ray longed for “the basic stuff” rather than material things.
She says with a smile: “The thing I missed the very, very most was a flushing toilet.”
‘Future to embrace’
Often, the couple had to relieve themselves in the bushes, and showers were a rare luxury.
Wild camping is not legal in most of England and Wales, but as they could not afford official camp sites, they had to put up with locals complaining about the places where they pitched up.
It also meant Ray could appear unkempt, leading to harsh criticism, as she received from the judgmental dog walker.
But despite their ups and downs, the lengthy trek showed Ray and Moth that they may have a future to embrace after all, as he grew stronger day by day.
Ray says: “The moment Moth rescued our tent from the tide, we realised how much his health had changed, from not being able to put his coat on without help at the beginning of that walk to just running up the beach with a tent above his head.
“I am coming to understand the power of moving, what it does to our body, and that our bodies are capable of repairing themselves in ways we maybe don’t fully understand yet.”
Having to lug everything on their backs meant the couple only carried the essentials, such as cooking gear, first aid kit and clothes.
Ray says: “We left behind more or less every material thing that we owned.”
But the long journey gradually helped them come to terms with losing their home.
Ray says: “The path didn’t wipe it all out, it just made it possible to live with, to carry it more easily.
“As time went by, it was less about the tent, it was actually the path that really became home.”
Once winter set in, wild camping became impossible and the couple found a shed to stay in.
But they restarted the following summer, completing the full route.
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Afterwards, Moth returned to university to study sustainable horticulture and landscape design and they were able to live off his student loans.
Ray had written a diary of the walk for Moth and was persuaded to send it to publishers.
It was a big hit in 2018 with many celebrity fans, including Gillian Anderson, who said: “I bought Ray’s audiobook and was profoundly affected by it.”
Soon afterwards film-makers soon started knocking.
Recalling their reaction at learning Gillian Anderson would play her, Ray said: “I was quite shocked because she’s just so perfect and beautiful and utterly glamorous.
“And I remember going into the house to tell Moth, and I think he misheard me, because he said, ‘Ooh, Pamela Anderson’.”
Later, watching the film with friends and family meant sitting through a sex scene where Gillian and Jason get very physical in their sleeping bags.
Ray said: “I did have to warn them. I did tell them that they were watching Gillian Anderson, not me, so that was fine.”
The couple now live in Cornwall on a farm, having been allowed to stay there by a wealthy fan of The Salt Path book.
They continue to do long walks, including a 1,000-mile trek three years ago through Scotland and into England.
Now I don’t see homeless people, I see a person whose life has taken a turn for the worse
Ray Winn
Moth’s health has deteriorated, but much slower than medics expected. It is unclear how he has managed to defy his bleak prognosis.
Ray says: “These illnesses that come under the umbrella of CBD, they don’t receive much funding because they are so rare, and so we understand very little about them.”
Readjusting to normal life has not been easy, and Ray would sometimes sleep on the floor at home because it had become so familiar.
Her attitude to rough sleeping has also changed, as she came to realise there are so many reasons why people are homeless.
Some of the people the Winns met during their coastal journey, living in “cars, trailers and hidden places”, were workers on minimum wages.
She says: “Now I don’t see homeless people, I see a person whose life has taken a turn for the worse.
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“If there is anything that I hope people take from this film, I would really love it if they walked out of the cinema, and saw someone in a doorway, that they would see them slightly differently, maybe just as an individual, not a difficult statistic.”
- The Salt Path is in cinemas from Friday.
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