Devon

Devon is where Ray and Moth’s walk first becomes a way of living without a home rather than simply a journey away from one. Entering North Devon on foot, they encounter a coast that tests their bodies and exposes the uncertainty of their future; its cliffs, streams and beaches also give their days a structure they can choose for themselves.

A threshold into homelessness

The journey towards Devon begins in Taunton, where Ray and Moth stand with their rucksacks at their feet and recognize that they are truly homeless. Their previous travels had always retained the possibility of returning through a door, even if that door belonged to a life they were escaping. Now, Ray feels safest where she stands and does not want to move. They nevertheless take a bus to Minehead, paying ten pounds each from a purse that has only fifty pounds left. The weekly deposit of forty-eight pounds gives them a narrow financial foothold, but no home to return to.

At Minehead, the giant metal hands holding a map mark the start of the South West Coast Path. They linger there, taking photographs and adjusting their packs, reluctant to begin but aware that the walk gives them somewhere to go. At half past three on a Thursday afternoon, they set off on a route of 630 miles. Devon first confronts them not as a scenic destination but as a physical demand: on the steep zigzag path above Minehead, they stop on a bench, look towards the sea through the branches and reread Paddy Dillon’s South West Coast Path guidebook. Its description of the route as drifting inland and uphill seems painfully inadequate to the climb beneath their feet.

The first miles: fatigue and arrival

The early path makes ordinary comforts newly conspicuous. After several days of travelling, walking and sleeping in a tent, Ray and Moth have not washed; she had assumed they could swim each day, but much of the route keeps them above sea level. The wooded cliffs offer a different relief: oak trees lean towards the edge, and the sea wind moves through their leaves. Their bodies register the landscape as a succession of effort, exposure and brief reprieve.

Two days into the walk, the oaks give way to rhododendrons, and the walkers realize they have entered North Devon. The milestone matters because they are still moving despite exhaustion. The plants spread across the cliffside above and below the narrow path, their glossy leaves and spring flowers set against a history of contested belonging: Ray recalls how rhododendrons had been cut back in a Welsh valley, where their stumps remained and began to regenerate. In Devon, the plants make the landscape feel both resilient and unsettled, an image that accompanies a journey in which Ray and Moth are also trying to find a place without yet knowing where they can stay.

The path itself leaves little room for comfort. At one point the cliff rises above and falls away below, with barely three feet of level ground between. Ray and Moth make tea on the path anyway. As they sit there, Ray contrasts the work and domestic troubles discussed by approaching walkers with her own circumstances: she has no job or household to manage, but she and Moth are homeless, and he is dying. Devon’s open-air freedom is therefore inseparable from the insecurity that brought them onto the coast.

Devon as shelter and passage

Further along the North Devon coast, the route exposes them to heat as well as steep terrain. The headlands are open and treeless, and the streams become essential for refilling their water bottles. Ray describes the coastline from Hartland Point as a ragged, water-cut succession of rock, while the long stretch of walking leaves her skin burned and peeling. After eleven days without clean water since Combe Martin, she finds a small waterfall and washes beneath its icy fall. The brief immersion is practical as well as restorative: sand, salt and accumulated dirt are rinsed from her body before she puts her stiff clothes back on.

When Moth’s pain and exhaustion make continuing difficult, their movement through the county is not always continuous. After a ride in a truck, they take a bus to Barnstaple and change to another for Westward Ho! Ray feels that the journey has been interrupted and that she is cheating. The town’s grey appearance disappoints the spectacle suggested by its name, and the break in the trail leaves the couple disorientated. With their money dwindling, Moth needs a beer; they sit in a bleak bar overlooking a concrete walkway as children dodge waves breaking over the sea wall. The scene sets the practical limits of their walk against the ideal of uninterrupted progress: they must sometimes accept transport, rest and the ordinary costs of keeping going.

On a beach farther along the Devon coast, the landscape becomes an improvised refuge. Ray and Moth watch turnstones searching among black rocks and seaweed while Moth, cold and aching, dozes in his sleeping bag. Ray gathers driftwood and dried seaweed for a fire. As evening falls, Wales disappears from view and Lundy becomes the only visible landmass. Their shelter is makeshift and their prospects remain uncertain, but the immediate setting has narrowed to the path, their feet and the fire. After a night of worsening joint pain, Moth eventually sleeps, wakes more alert and stronger, eats a cereal bar and is ready to move on.

Movement, choice and the approaching future

The meanings of Devon continue to shape the couple’s understanding of homelessness even after the county itself has become part of a longer route. Ray reflects that they have sometimes presented their homelessness as a voluntary adventure because telling strangers they had lost their home and had no money brought conversations to an abrupt end. The distinction between having sold a home and having lost one changes how other people respond, although neither version alters the material fact of their displacement. Repeating the more acceptable story dulls the grief without resolving it.

Walking offers a different kind of answer. Ray describes the route as a meditation in which salt wind, dust and light gradually occupy the space of anxious thought. Each climb out of a combe becomes a small victory, and each day survived supplies a reason to continue into the next. Devon’s terrain is not merely scenery in this account: its climbs set the rhythm of effort, and its repeated forward steps make a future possible one day at a time.

Later, as Ray and Moth approach Plymouth, the path’s promise of routine begins to feel fragile. Rain falls as they walk in silence, and the city ahead seems like a doorway into an unknown future. The next ferry crossings have become markers of the journey’s final stretch, while the certainty of packing the tent and walking each day has protected them from decisions about what comes afterward. Their anxiety sharpens around the prospect of stopping and around Moth’s illness. In retrospect, the Devon miles are significant not because they settle those questions, but because they establish the pattern that sustains them: a precarious passage through unfamiliar ground that can feel, for a time, more secure than any borrowed room or lost home.