‘We thought: it can’t be the Salt Path couple – they’d have told us they were homeless’

Chloe Hadjimatheou

Narrative Editor

‘We thought: it can’t be the Salt Path couple – they’d have told us they were homeless’

When fellow walkers the Parsons found they were in Raynor Winn’s book, they were baffled. Details of their encounter didn’t add up

Joanne and David Parsons spent only an hour or so chatting to two other hikers they met in a cafe on the South West Coast Path, but they made a lasting impression. “We walked into a cafe to have breakfast, and when we saw them it was obvious they were walkers as well,” David recalls. “They were loaded down with [camping] stuff and using their own teabags, but they didn’t say they were homeless.”

They learned later that the couple they had spent a jovial hour with in the Fat Apples Cafe, near Porthallow in Cornwall, were Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, after Winn subsequently wrote a bestselling memoir about the walk, The Salt Path.