Hiking the South West Coast Path

Hiking the South West Coast Path is the journey Ray and Moth undertake after losing their home in Wales, with Moth’s illness and their uncertain future pressing close behind them. What begins as an improvised answer to eviction becomes a 630-mile walk marked by physical pain, scarce money, wild camping, interruptions, and difficult choices about whether to continue. The path offers no simple escape from homelessness or illness; instead, its daily demands give the couple a purpose and gradually alter Ray’s sense of what it means to have a home.

The decision to leave

The idea takes shape during the crisis that ends the couple’s life on their farm. As bailiffs search the house, Ray and Moth hide together under the stairs. In a packing box, Ray notices Five Hundred Mile Walkies, a book she remembers from her twenties about a man who walked the South West Coast Path with his dog. She proposes walking, without having worked out the cost, the distance, where they will sleep, or what they will do afterward. The suggestion is less a finished plan than a way to imagine a next step when the life they had built seems to be over.

Their farm had represented security and a shared history. Ray had met Moth when she was eighteen; over the decades they rebuilt the ruined property, raised two children, grew vegetables and kept hens, and created a barn where visitors could stay. The loss followed years of conflict over a failed investment and Cooper’s claim for payment. Their savings went on solicitors’ fees, and the couple had to represent themselves after their case was judged too complex for legal aid. A charge was registered against the farm, followed by a claim for possession. After three years and ten court appearances, they believed they had found evidence that could save their home, but the prospect of leaving remained decisive to the journey that followed.

Preparing for a 630-mile walk

The choice of route makes the scale of the undertaking concrete. Ray imagines following the coast from Minehead through Devon and Cornwall to Poole, slowly enough for Moth to manage. The small brown guidebook by Paddy Dillon, The South West Coast Path: From Minehead to South Haven Point, supplies a map and a route, but its apparent promise of a 500-mile walk proves misleading: the path is 630 miles long. Their old packs are unusable, and replacing them with comparable new ones would cost nearly £250. They buy cheaper rucksacks instead, then discover that the equipment they want to carry will not fit.

The first attempt to load a sixty-litre pack with their old orange canvas tent and two slightly rusty billy cans ends with Moth on his knees in agony after walking only twice around the room. The couple respond by stripping their belongings down to what they consider necessary for survival. Their preparation is therefore also a rehearsal in giving things up: they cannot carry the contents of their former life onto the path. In early August, after staying on a friend’s floor while Moth recovered from back pain and stiffness, they stand with their packs in Taunton and recognize that they are truly homeless. They have no door to return to. With about fifty pounds left, they pay for the bus to Minehead and set out with a small weekly income expected in the bank.

The path as bodily work

At Minehead, the couple linger at the monument of giant metal hands holding a map, taking photographs and adjusting their packs before making the first step. The start gives homelessness a temporary direction: if they can begin the walk, they have somewhere to go and a purpose for moving. The reality quickly differs from the guidebook’s mild descriptions. On the steep zigzag path above Minehead, they stop on a bench to breathe and reread the route, already wary of the guidebook’s tendency to underestimate the terrain.

Walking is not an abstract line on a map but a repeated encounter between bodies and landscape. Ray’s legs, hips, and shoulders hurt; heat radiates from the rock path, while wind, salt air, and the height above the sea can bring exhilaration alongside vertigo. Moth walks with a lean away from the sea, and his capacity to carry the pack becomes an ongoing concern. The symptoms of corticobasal degeneration make the journey ethically and emotionally fraught for Ray: she worries that the daily strain could worsen his condition and wonders whether proposing the walk was irresponsible. The consultant had advised Moth not to tire himself or walk too far. Even so, the couple keep moving, measuring progress in climbs completed and days survived rather than in the certainty of a cure or a settled future.

The route also imposes practical limits and detours. When the couple travel by bus from Barnstaple to Westward Ho!, Ray feels that the break has left them disconnected from the trail. The journey can be interrupted by pain, transport, weather, or money; it is not a purist march that proceeds without adjustment. Later, after more than 250 miles of pain, exhaustion, hunger, wild nights, and rough weather, they face the option of taking a bus away from the path and returning to the familiarity of Wales. Instead, as rain drips from their packs, they choose to continue. Ray understands the choice as a form of control: on the trail they can decide whether to walk or stop, rather than feel that they are imposing on friends and family by relying on their goodwill.

A moving refuge and a changed story

The walk does not immediately produce the reflective clarity Ray expected. Much of the time, she and Moth talk about food, heat, or rain; the repetitive act of putting one foot in front of the other can become a blankness that keeps larger fears at bay. The public response to their homelessness also shapes what they say about themselves. When they explain that they lost their home, people tend to withdraw from the conversation. They begin presenting the journey as a midlife adventure after selling their home, a version that attracts admiration rather than stigma. Repeating this more acceptable account dulls their grief, even as Ray questions whether she is also denying Moth’s illness or hoping the diagnosis is wrong.

The landscape gives the journey a different kind of continuity. After the difficult stretch from Hartland Quay to Bude takes them three days rather than the single day described in Paddy Dillon’s guidebook, Ray compares the burdens they carry to pain-worn stones: still heavy, but less jagged. Along the coast, the rhythm of climbing and descending, hunger and thirst, gradually becomes familiar. At the southernmost point, Ray recognizes that the route will turn north and that the couple must eventually decide what to do for winter. The path has become a strip of ground they can inhabit without owning it. She describes a change from fighting the loss of their farm and resenting a bureaucracy that failed to recognize their account of events toward a more accepting sense of belonging to the elements.

Continuing beyond the first journey

That change does not remove practical uncertainty. After a period inland, returning to the coastal path brings Ray a renewed sense of relief, and camping on Ballard Down above Swanage makes the familiar act of walking feel right again. Yet the couple still face pain, accommodation costs, and the question of how to live afterward. Moth worries whether they have made the right decision; Ray’s answer rests on a concrete hope: they can earn money for a room, he can retrain, and she can find work or retrain too. The promise is not that everything is settled, but that they may find a place of their own without depending indefinitely on others’ goodwill.

As the trail approaches Plymouth, the path’s dependable rhythm becomes a source of both security and apprehension. Packing the tent and walking each day has given the couple a structure; the thought of having to stop and re-enter ordinary life raises the unanswered question of what will happen to Moth. Their plans remain vulnerable to money and circumstance. When a proposed arrangement falls through, they are left on the pavement looking along the road from the Isle of Portland toward the mainland, drained and without a settled next move. They decide to take a slow few days along Chesil Beach rather than insist on following a purist itinerary. Hiking the South West Coast Path thus remains both chosen action and constrained mobility: a way to keep going when home has been lost, and a temporary form of belonging that cannot by itself determine what comes next.