The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

raynor winn
the wild silence

I read The Salt Path and immediately bought its sequel, Wild Silence. I read Wild Silence in the same breath as I had read The Salt Path.

I cried a little. I never cry reading books. But it was so good.

Raynor continues her story after a lucky finish of walking the coastal path and finding a friend who could rent a small house for Winn and her husband. Moth is studying in his old age, but his disease seems to be getting hold of him now.

I closed the book, overwhelmed with the sadness of the thought that the day would come when Moth couldn’t remember what we did. The day when CBD had crept so far that the clear, magical, wild experience we’d shared was lost to him forever and I’d be left alone with the memory. The day when the guidebook would be the only record that our walk had ever happened. Where the hell was he?

As a last resort to retain their shared memories, she wrote the story of the coastal path as a present for her husband.

‘What is this? Is this what you’ve been doing?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve been writing it for you.’ I felt shy and nervous, as if it was the first present I’d ever given him. ‘All that time and it was for me.’ ‘It’s the path, the book of our path. So you can always keep the memory.’

Raynor and Moth Winn
Raynor and Moth

Even more than in The Salt Path itself, Winn’s detailed descriptions of nature and surroundings remind me of the beautiful, rigorous details that Tim Robinson uses in his books.

Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet.

Many threads run through the books, including Moth’s health, Raynor’s shyness, the death of her dominant mother, the development of a writer, and Raynor’s love for Moth. These could make the reading cheesy, but that never happens.

Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

Southwest Coast path

My wife and I spent our holidays in Cornwall a few years ago. We traveled from the north through Plymouth to the south of Cornwall and back up to Minehead, passing places named Lizard’s End, Mousehole, and Land’s End. We walked parts of the Coastal Path. The landscape is rough and beautiful.

I got a novel about this area, The Salt Path, a week ago. It has become a famous book. I read it on the back and then on the Internet. I loved the book. Immediately after finishing it, I bought its sequel, Wild Silence.

In The Salt Path, Raynor Winn tells how she and her husband walk the coastal path of Cornwall that I had seen parts of that summer. They follow Paddy Dillon, a travel writer and experienced hiker who followed the path a few decades before them. Dillon wrote a book about his trip, South West Coast Path—Plymouth to Poole.

Winn and her husband Moth have just gone bankrupt and lost their house to an untruthful friend, and Moth has been diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nerve system.

Their view of life changes as they follow the path. Strangely, Walking seems to improve Moth’s health.

Fowey, Cornwall
Fowey