This is Raynor Winn’s third book, following on from [b:The Salt Path|38085814|The Salt Path|Raynor Winn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1520119402l/38085814.SY75.jpg|59753071] and [b:The Wild Silence|52185541|The Wild Silence|Raynor Winn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1591234123l/52185541.SY75.jpg|73609508]. If you have read these previous books, you will be familiar with her story and her husband Moth’s struggle with corticobasal degeneration, a Parkinson’s-like disease. Moth’s health is declining, and they decide to walk the Cape Wrath Trail, over two hundred miles of tough terrain through Scotland’s remotest mountains and lochs. This may sound counter intuitive for a man who can barely walk in a straight line, but they discovered that long distance walking dramatically improved Moth’s symptoms in the past.

Winn beautifully describes the landscapes they traipse through - you can smell the heather, hear the waterfalls and feel the bites of the insistent midges!

The author doesn’t shy away from voicing her dismay at the effects of climate change on the landscape, and the impact that humans have had since time immemorial. In Scotland alone there is only one percent of the old forest remaining.

After completing The Cape Wrath Trail, they continue to walk through England, and can’t help but notice the lack of biodiversity around them as farmers turn to intensive monoculture farming. It’s easy to accuse Winn of being preachy as she observes the effects of climate change. But she and Moth are immersed in the landscape and the loss of habitat and wildlife is inescapable, and heartbreaking.

Landlines records one couple’s journey through an (at times) harsh landscape, battling not only the elements but their own physical limitations. Throughout it all, they rely on each other’s strengths, both physical and emotional. It is a portrait of a marriage that has withstood the worst that life can throw at it, and still they manage to share a look, and know what the other is thinking. It is a testament to the power of love, and the restorative power of walking!

The Wild Silence is the follow up book to The Salt Path which was one of my favourite books of 2019.

After completing their 630 mile walk along the wild English coastline, Raynor and Moth are now reasonably settled in rented accomodation, but Moth’s debilitating illness, (Corticobasal degeneration (CBD)) has returned with a vengeance and Raynor is struggling to accept his failing health. Her description of the destructive nature of Moths’s illness is harrowing:

CBC was changing him. Not with the instant destruction of an illness that spread like wildfire, but with a slow loss of form and connectivity…Less wildfire, more a slow, insidious climate change of lost functions. His was becoming a flatter, emptier place. His body a world of hedges without birdlife, of rivers without fish and orchards without insects, as his tongue forgot how to taste and the feelings slipped from his hands.

In the wild grip of nature we had formed a bond that didn’t need words, a bond as palpably real and completely untouchable as the song of the deer in the quiet stillness before the storm.

At what point in our lives does cynicism take over from instinct? When we stop feeling the softness of rain on our face and start worrying about being wet?…When do we make that switch from being part of the natural world to being an observer with an assumed right to control it?

I found myself totally immersed in this extraordinary memoir. Perhaps I could relate to Ray and Moth’s story easily because I’m of the same ‘vintage’. When you get to our stage of life (50+), you’re looking forward to a pretty easy ride, with plenty of home comforts. When Ray and her husband Moth lose everything: their home and their livelihood, through no fault of their own, I felt outraged on their behalf - the injustice of it all was extreme. This was a home they had raised their children in, a home that they had built together, and a home that they expected to live in for the rest of their lives.

I cannot remember the last time a book made me cry, but I was sobbing in the first chapter - and that was before Moth was diagnosed with a terminal illness. If this had happened to me, I think I would have curled up into a foetal position and given up! That is not how Ray and Moth reacted - they chose instead to walk the 630 mile South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall.

With only a pack each, containing the minimum of cloths and food, a tent and light sleeping bags they set off into the wild. They had virtually no money, so camped wild, usually illegally, and often went hungry. Their experiences of extreme weather and hungry were visceral. I could feel the cold at night, and the searing heat of the mid-day summer sun. They were surprised by how people shunned them if they told them they were homeless, so stopped telling the truth, and said instead they had sold their house and were ‘living the dream’, walking without a timetable.

But as they struggle to put one foot in front of the other and follow the path, something is happening to them. As one woman says to them: “You’ve felt the hand of nature. It won’t ever leave you now; you’re salted. People fight the elements, the weather, but when it’s touched you, when you let it be, you’re never the same again.” Close to the end of their walk, Ray realises “…something in me was changing season. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable…A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.”

The Salt Path was shortlisted for the Wainwright Golden Beer Book Prize and the Costa Book Awards, and I can understand why. I feel I know Ray and Moth intimately and I will never forget their journey.