We lost everything and became homeless in our 50s just as my husband was diagnosed with an incurable disease - now Gillian Anderson is playing me in Hollywood movie about how we survived

Daily Mail​

23-05-2025

The plan came to Raynor Winn in the most unlikely of places.
It was while hiding from bailiffs under the stairs as her farmhouse was about to be repossessed that she spotted a book that had been on the shelf for years.
It was the story of a man who'd walked the South West Coast Path – the 630-mile walk from Minehead in Somerset, through Devon and Cornwall to Poole, Dorset – and she knew then that was what she and her husband Moth must do.
'We were living a dream life in Wales,' says Raynor. 'When we first came to the house the roof was falling in, but we had our fantasy of what we were going to do and that's what we did.'
They made their living hosting tourists, but a bad investment meant that suddenly they lost everything in their 50s.
They were given less than a week to leave, the only positive being that their two children were away at university.
Just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, they did.
'In the few days that we had to pack up, Moth was diagnosed with the degenerative disease Corticobasal Degeneration, which causes problems with movement, speech and memory, and has no cure,' says Raynor.
Deciding to do the walk was an act of desperation.
'We were about to become homeless, and it seemed the most obvious thing to do,' says Raynor. 'Fill a rucksack and go for a walk. Follow a line on the map and see if that would take us into the next day, because at that point there was no purpose to the next day.'
Starting in 2013, they did the walk over two summers, sheltering over winter in a friend's shed.
When Raynor decided to write about it with the help of the notes Moth had made, their daughter suggested they see if an agent might be interested.
Raynor's book The Salt Path was published in 2018 and became a bestseller (as well as coining a new nickname for the seaside walk), and now it has been turned into a life-affirming film starring Gillian Anderson as Raynor and Jason Isaacs as Moth.
It follows them as they struggle in the rain and bask in the sun. We see them become stronger mentally and physically, buoyed by the people they meet and the beauty of nature.
'There are three characters in our story – Moth, me, and the path,' says Raynor.
'What grew over time was the sense of strength and support we took from the natural world and just putting one foot in front of the other.'
The worst times were when people recoiled after she told them they'd lost their home.
'But we also met incredible people. Often they had very little, but offered us everything they had. That sense of communities that exist outside the mainstream comes across in the film.'
It was during one scary moment that Raynor found a feeling of strength. 'It opens the film and it's my favourite scene.
'We were camped in this little cove and we'd pitched our tent what seemed a good distance from high tide. But I woke up at 3am to realise the tide was about a metre away and still coming in. We grabbed the tent and ran to high ground. And I realised Moth had run up a beach carrying a tent when weeks before he hadn't been able to put his coat on. That's when we understood something was happening to his body that hadn't been predicted. It was a miracle.'
Raynor and Moth spent a day with Gillian and Jason when they were filming at the Valley of Rocks in Exmoor.
'When they told me Gillian Anderson was going to play me, I was shocked,' says Raynor.
'She's stunning. How could she possibly portray me at my rawest? But she's done an incredible job of capturing that sense of me being lost in life. I could see why they chose Jason. He has the same effervescence as Moth.'
Moth was given possibly only two years to live after his diagnosis; 12 years on, he is not 'cured', but nature keeps him strong.
'The point of the story is that no matter how difficult things appear to be or how much you have been told you can't go forwards, there's always a way,' Raynor says.
'It's about finding a way to stand up when life has knocked you down.'
The Salt Path is in cinemas from May 23.