Gillian Anderson, Jason Isaacs and The Salt Path author Raynor Winn on homelessness and human spirit

Wild goats perched on precarious crags that make up the impressive and imposing Valley of the Rocks on the northern edge of Exmoor National Park watch as their habitat becomes a film set for the day.

Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are sharing a scene, crew rush back and forth between takes as scripts are passed around and cameras reset – all the drama that comes with moviemaking even if the main action of this scene is the making of a cup of tea.

It’s an adaptation of bestselling book The Salt Path. Written by Raynor Winn, it recounts the epic trek she and her husband Moth took after they were made homeless and faced an unimaginably bleak future.

Get the latest news and insight into how the Big Issue magazine is made by signing up for the Inside Big Issue newsletter

Today the couple are visiting the set, along with Big Issue. “It’s so surreal, Alice in Wonderland territory,” Raynor says as she watches her life being recreated for cameras. It’s the latest chapter in an unexpected journey that began long before. 

The book became a publishing phenomenon and is a story loved by millions – but if you’re a longtime Big Issue buyer you’d have read it here first. This is the inside story of The Salt Path.

On 6 May 2017, we received an email. The essence of what would become The Salt Path is all there in those few sentences. I started to work out with Winn what an article could look like. She said that she had written a book, at the time called Lightly Salted Blackberries, but had had no luck finding a publisher.

Although it was not a book in the traditional sense. Moth Winn had been diagnosed with CBD, a rare neurodegenerative condition with ever-worsening symptoms including more restricted movement and cognitive deterioration. Walking had been a desperate, defiant reaction.

Worried that Moth would forget their time together as his memory worsened, Raynor typed up a diary she had kept and gave it to him as a 50th birthday present. She was considering self-publishing the story but, in the meantime, wanted to write for us.

“I was hiding under the stairs when I decided to walk,” the article began. It was the moment bailiffs had come to evict Raynor and Moth from the farm that had been their family home for 20 years. She went on to describe their odyssey, the regenerative power of nature they discovered, how homelessness is hidden in rural areas. She explained that attitudes would shift when people they met along the way found out they weren’t adventurous retirees but supposed undesirables. In the village of Lynton a woman castigated Raynor for being a “tramp”. “That was the moment my sense of self finally collapsed,” she wrote.

The magazine with Raynor’s feature came out on 10 July 2017. Readers got in touch to say how much the story had resonated with them and they wanted to know more. A few weeks later Raynor reported a remarkable encounter she’d had.

She sent a note: “At the weekend I was walking on the coastal path when I spotted a man with a full rucksack walking towards me. Not your average backpacker, face full of piercings and a yellow road worker’s waterproof. We met at a gate and I started the usual conversation: ‘Hi, it’s wet, where are you heading?’ and he went on to tell a great tale.

“He was sleeping on the streets in Exeter, when he read an article in Big Issue about a woman who was homeless but walked the SWCP. So, he thought he’d do the same. He’d been walking for a week and said, ‘It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but the best, I already feel different.’ He wouldn’t come back with me for a meal, said he had to carry on, he had a real sense of purpose.

“Just thought I’d share that with you. Big Issue, changing lives!”

Raynor also told me that she’d put her plans to self-publish on hold. “I had given up hope of getting an agent or publisher but randomly approached an agent 10 days ago, mentioning the Big Issue article (thought I’d give it one last go) and she came back to me within the day. Just completing the proposal to be sent out to publishers, so fingers crossed. Don’t think she’d have considered it if it hadn’t been for your article, so thanks again.”

The next part of the story is astonishing. The Salt Path was published in March 2018 and struck a nerve. It became the bestselling book in independent bookshops in 2019, was nominated for the Wainwright Prize and the Costa Book Awards. 

In total, The Salt Path has spent 102 weeks in the bestseller charts and is number 37 in The Sunday Times list of the 100 bestsellers of the last 50 years. And now it’s about to reach a whole new audience with the film version now in cinemas.

Read more:

• White Lotus star Jason Isaacs on why we love watching the 1% be ‘miserable as hell’
• Gillian Anderson, Billie Piper and Rufus Sewell on recreating Prince Andrew’s car-crash interview in Scoop
• Raynor Winn: ‘We took a leap of faith towards a greener, wilder future’

It’s 29 June 2023, day 14 of production on The Salt Path. Gillian Anderson is playing Raynor, Jason Isaacs is Moth. Anderson is famous for The X Files and The Crown, Isaacs has starred in everything from Harry Potter to the latest series of The White Lotus. Now they’re shooting a scene where they’re taking a tea break on the path. They are directed by renowned theatre director Marianne Elliott making her big screen debut, having to work around a complication you’d rarely get on stage: periodic shriek-bleats of the nearby goats.

Before the next scene is set, the real stars arrive. “Hello Moth,” says Moth when he meets Isaacs. The pair compare notes, talking about how cargo shorts had been vetoed and that a surprising amount of the budget had gone on Isaacs’ hairstyle. Filming restarts. I sit with Raynor and Moth as they watch the footage on a monitor. Anderson appears onscreen. “Looks like you,” says Moth. “I love you too,” Raynor replies.

The actors are clambering over rocks before collapsing and considering whether they can go on. Raynor and Moth look at each other in disbelief. “I recognise the moment, it’s bonkers,” says Moth.

“Without Big Issue we wouldn’t be here today,” he tells me. Raynor continues: “I saw someone selling Big Issue in the local town, and I distinctly remember thinking, OK, I may never publish this thing but I have something to say about rural homelessness. And Big Issue was the only place.”

They have worked out it’s 10 years tomorrow they were evicted. Where we are is a mile from Lynton, where Raynor wrote in the magazine that she lost her sense of self. To think a decade later she’d be watching herself in the form of a Hollywood star is unbelievable.

“That was probably the lowest point for us, that day in Lynton,” Raynor says. “We were just a few days into the walk and already down to just £9 left. I was counting the coins in my hand thinking, noodles or bread rolls? A lady came around the corner with a great big white dog; another was tied outside the shop.

“One dog leaped at the other, caught my rucksack, sent the coins flying. Well, I was straight onto the pavement, hand in the drainage grill trying to catch those coins because they were precious, and the lady was poking me with her foot, saying, ‘We don’t have drunken tramps like you here’. That was the moment I realised it wasn’t just that my life had fallen apart, the view of society towards me had completely changed. It was a real rock-bottom moment and quite a journey back from that really.”

Quite a journey. A film being made about your life is almost unfathomable, but most miraculous is that Moth, given a life expectancy of six to eight years, is here with us today, charming everyone he meets, including the members of the crew who stop walkers on the path between takes. We wonder how many are visiting the route because they’re fans of the book.

After lunch, during which Isaacs holds court with dazzling charisma, we watch as he and Anderson stomp up a hillside through gorse and ferns, realise they’re lost and charge back down again. Isaacs literally throws himself into the role by throwing himself into a roll, tumbling down the slope. It’s hard to tell if it was an accident or acting.

Almost two years later, Isaacs remembers his stunt. “The fall was very good,” he says.

“It wasn’t in the film.” It’s April 2025 and he and Anderson are doing press from a neat hotel room ahead of the movie’s release.

Inevitably, I remind them that I commissioned the original article Raynor wrote for Big Issue.

Gillian Anderson: “That’s amazing.”

Jason Isaacs: “You’re responsible for everything. Thank you so much.”

When you’re playing a real person and they’re on set, does that affect you? 

GA: That’s actually the only time I’ve ever had that experience, playing a real person not only still alive, but actually watching.

JI: I think Maggie Thatcher’s been watching over you. I was self-conscious about getting Moth’s walk right, how he looked when he couldn’t move his leg, getting his backpack hunched over the shoulder.

When did you first get involved in the story?

GA: It was probably about a year and a half or two before they went into prep. I bought Ray’s audiobook and was profoundly affected by it. I was then trying to find out about the rights. I knew Lloyd Levin, one of the producers, when I used to live in LA. I reached out after I found out that he had the rights. It had been a few years, did he think it was actually going to happen? If he didn’t, could I take over the rights or do it with them? He said, we are making this, then they came to me for Ray.

JI: When they were looking for someone to play Moth I went and had lunch with Marianne [Elliott]. I did my research. I looked at all the pictures. Moth wore a little blue bandana, I wore a little blue scarf. I tried to look and be as much like Moth as possible. I was mercenary. I wanted to be in it, because I’ve been a fan of hers [gestures to Gillian] for a long time and because the book was incredibly moving, incredibly powerful on so many levels.

Different people find different parts of the book that touch them. What aspects appealed to you?

GA: One of the things that really spoke to me was Ray talking about being a parent. If they couldn’t provide a home and emotional support or financial support, then how were they still parents? If they had not only let their kids down but weren’t able to help them. The trauma, the shame, the grief around that. I’d never really thought about that before in relation to somebody becoming homeless.

JI: How quickly and easily they became homeless as well. One moment they were sure that they were going to keep their home then they’re sitting in court and suddenly there is a date, a ticking clock. They were in a position they never thought they’d find themselves in and experienced what many readers of your magazine and people who sell your magazine have experienced. 

They counted so many acts of generosity and kindness, which Ray documented in Big Issue, but many examples of the opposite too. It was a world that suddenly became visible like a magic eye picture.

In the film, Anderson and Isaacs bring the loving and lived-in relationship between Raynor and Moth alive. That is the beating heart of the book and remains so on the big screen. It’s a soul-nourishing, life-affirming film that celebrates nature’s power as a solace and succour. 

But forget my review, what does Raynor think of it?

“It’s incredible to look at the screen and somebody’s there pretending to be you,” she tells me when we catch up ahead of release.

“When I was told it was going to be Gillian Anderson playing Ray, I had my OH WOW moment. Then I thought, hold on, she’s so perfect and so glamorous, how on earth is she going to capture me at my lowest? But when we went on to set that day at the Valley of Rocks and she appeared it was like, yeah, she’s got it. That sense of being a bit caught by the weather and the landscape and life.”

The first time Raynor watched, there were scenes that made her catch her breath.

“Near the start when Ray and Moth are under the stairs, it put me back there, all the rawness of that moment of losing the house,” she says.

If you could go back in time to that moment, what would you say to reassure yourself about how things would turn out?

“I would say, pick that rucksack up, because it’s not going to be OK if you don’t. I’d be holding the rucksack for her to put on.”

Since the eviction in 2013, Raynor believes homelessness has become a bigger issue.

“We had the wonders of lockdown and Everyone In, then straight afterwards, we showed that nothing had changed because everyone was back out again,” she says. “As far as rural homelessness is concerned, which I wrote about in that article, things have got worse. There are more homeless people in the rural communities now than there were in 2013. I certainly see more than I did then. Also more people having to choose an alternative way of living simply because they can’t afford housing.”

Raynor followed The Salt Path with two further bestsellers, The Wild Silence and Landlines, with another book arriving in autumn.

After filming two summers ago, Moth’s condition deteriorated. “He had a difficult year last year but he’s getting through it now,” Raynor says.

“It’s taken us a while to work our way back from that but he’s done what he always does, one step at a time.”

The Salt Path is about breaking down your problems so they don’t break you. For Raynor and Moth, long-distance walking wasn’t really about reaching a destination, it was about finding a place for a new journey to begin.

“It becomes like a meditation after a while,” Raynor says. “All you think about is the next step, then you get to the top of a headland, look up and the horizon has shifted.”

All of us are faced with challenges. Trekking hundreds of miles may not be the solution to them all, but it could provide a guide. It’s one countless readers have found and followed.

“That’s been the most remarkable thing to come from the book,” Raynor says, “Realising that you put your story out in a fairly honest way and so many stories come back. Painful, personal stories from people about their struggles. I’ve come to feel now that it’s less my story and more our story – a story about how any of us stand up again.

“When I wrote that little article for you, we couldn’t have known where it would go, could we?” she smiles. “If it hadn’t been for Big Issue, there probably wouldn’t have been The Salt Path book. It’s that fundamental. 

“I had no history of writing, nothing to bring to the publishing table. Within a couple of weeks of that article, everything changed.

“I’ll never forget buying that copy of Big Issue – from the same seller in the street – and opening it, the picture of our tent on Chesil Beach. As far as I’m concerned, that was the pinnacle of my publishing life.

“It was the first step. Of many.”

The Salt Path is in cinemas now.

Promises are easy to break. Sign Big Issue’s petition for a Poverty Zero law and help us make tackling poverty a legal requirement, not just a policy priority.

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.