Landlines — the third part of Raynor Winn’s travelogue/memoir — sees her and her husband Moth once more lace up their walking books for a long-distance trek.
Their destination this time is the Cape Wrath trail in Scotland, an arduous 200 miles of bogland, lochs and steep mountains. It’s a trail that only the fittest walkers undertake yet Moth embarks on this walk when his medical condition — a rare and incurable degenerative brain disease — is worsening. Beset by fatigue and dizziness, just getting through a day of restoring an old cider farm, is an ordeal.
In tbose circumstances, most people would think it utter madness to set out on an expedition along the toughest and wildest trail in Britain. Raynor however believes that it could save her husband. This isn’t just a blind leap of faith. Walking a long-distance footpath had saved Moth once before — a 600-mile journey that formed the basis of Raynor’s first book, The Salt Path.
Eight years later they set off for Scotland in the hope that the combination of physical exertion and the psychological benefits of being immersed in nature, will provide a cure once more.
Challenges galore
Things don’t go quite according to plan. They hadn’t expected to be scrambling over such rocky terrain or plodding through boglands. Moth is so feeble, he can’t walk in a straight line. Raynor has a huge blister from her new walking boots. They’re cold and wet but campsites and hotels are closed because of the Covid pandemic. Their supplies of food run low because cafes and shops are wary of strangers who could be carrying the virus.
Do they just give up and head for home? Do they hell. They just head off on a different walk and then another and then another. Somehow a journey that was meant to be around 200 miles became almost 1,000 as they walked the whole way through the heart of England to the South West Coast Path and then home.
Irrational, irresponsible, maybe, but in that desperate moment our decision to walk offered every thing we needed — shelter in the form of our tent and a line on a map to follow. It gave us a route forward, a purpose, a reason to go on into the next day when all other reasons had fallen away.
Raynor turns this epic journey into a riveting chronicle that combines tension — we’re never absolutely sure that Moth will make it — with travelogue, humorous observations on her fellow walkers and reflections on environmental and socio-economic issues. Landlines frequently slides from one to another.
Notes about the physical discomforts of walking and wild camping for example, morph into a commentary on villages left empty because locals can’t compete with newcomers with more cash to splash about. An encounter with a group of of youngsters who plan to spend a night wild camping on a mountain summit gets Raynor ruminating that if they tried to do that in England they’d be breaking the law.
An appeal for change
As we approach the end of the book, Landlines edges close to being a manifesto for a new relationship with nature. One which envisages greater harmony between the needs of food production and a fundamental human need to feel connected to the land.
What if we re-imagine this land? Create one where biodiversity and humanity are set free. A land where we can feed ourselves without destroying our environment. What if we join up the islands of stranded biodiversity? By-pass the monocultures. Link are areas of wildlife-dense habitat to other areas, creating corridors of natural abundance. Landlines that join, one to the other, across the country, giving biodiversity free passage through a network of wild arteries that flow into every depleted corner, where wildlife, plants and humans roam free.
Wishful thinking maybe (I can’t see farmers giving up chemicals entirely as she suggests) but her ideas come from the heart rather than the head . What she lacks in practicality she more than makes up for in passion and a deep seated devotion to the healing power of nature.
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