The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn: book review

The Wild Silence (2020) is a memoir set in Cornwall, England. It follows the author’s first book The Salt Path ( 2019) about the 630 mile (1,000 kilometre) walk, with her husband Moth, along the South West Coast Path.

After their long walk along the South West Coast Path, they are homeless and decide to rent a farm house. This sequel recaps the author’s first memoir before detailing how they came to rent a farm house in a Cornwall fishing village.

Moth is diagnosed with a terminal neurodegenerative disease, with no treatment and no cure. After Raynor’s mother’s death the author says, ‘I was sobbing through one death, with the weight of another bearing down on me.’

Raynor writes of their new journey in their rental farm house as they prepare for Moth’s decline and death. Both in their 50s, Raynor and Moth, return to nature, and Moth is revitalized by his love of it, and of re-wilding the farm. The dilapidated stone house and orchard need a lot of work and care. While working on the farm, they discover the badger, fox, mole, heron, eagle, curlew, and much more. Like the badger, they have ‘gone to earth, gone to ground … A fully formed frog that would never hop back into the bucket of vague suggestion.’

This is a delightful book about the inspiration of nature and how vital it is to the quality of their lives – for Moth who is dying with dignity and for Raynor who opposes all the ‘bad’ medical choices and reassures readers of the uplifting, prolonging reasons to return to the natural path.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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