The Sound Of Silence

Raynor Winn and husband Moth were at rock bottom – homeless, penniless, and with a terminal diagnosis – when they embarked on a 630-mile walk around the South West Coast. Raynor’s book about the experience, The Salt Path, became a runaway bestseller. But what happened next? Katie Jarvis spoke to Raynor about her new book, The Wild Silence

- Katie Jarvis

There are curlews down on the creek at Raynor Winn’s farm. Long-legged curlews wielding their scythe-like bills to dig out juicy shellfish; feasting on wriggling leatherjackets in the field next to the house; filling the salt-air with wild cries.

A barn owl has moved into one of the outbuildings. Each night, he finds his favourite perch in front of the farmhouse as he scans for doomed mice. And, in early summer, a roe deer brought her dappled fawns to play…

So.

Let’s unpick this idyll. (And idyll it undoubtedly is.)

For when Raynor and her husband, Moth, moved into the farm in January last year, it was barren of wildlife.

“Maybe a few crows; the odd sparrow,” Raynor says. The damp farmhouse had been lying empty; the neglected land overworked.

“After a short period of working on the farm, simply trying to remove the detritus of heavy agricultural use, we were able to let it breathe again. Let the biodiversity find its own way back,” Raynor says. “And – oh, goodness – already this year, it’s remarkable how much wildlife has come back.”

So – let’s unpick a little bit more.

For then there’s the phrase, “Raynor Winn’s farm”. It is their farm… in the sense that they’ve made this corner of Cornwall (on a farm said to have been an inspiration for Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows) very much their own.