'I felt I was being gaslit' – the landlord who helped Raynor Winn and Moth

Moved by the plight of the Salt Path couple, Bill Cole rented his cider farm in Cornwall to them for a song. But they left him feeling confused and betrayed.

- Chloe Hadjimatheou

In 2018, the illustrated cover of The Salt Path caught Bill Cole’s eye, and he found himself profoundly moved by the story. His wife had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, so Raynor Winn’s struggle to come to terms with her partner's condition resonated with him. As did the idea that the couple had been conned by a close friend. Bill had also been betrayed by someone, costing him both professionally and personally, so he felt sympathy with Winn and her husband, Moth.

Bill, 58, had spent more than 30 years working in the City, mainly at a Dutch agricultural bank, RaboBank. He had saved for three decades to indulge his dream of owning his own farm. In 2011 he bought Haye at St Veep, nestling in the stunning Cornwall countryside overlooking the River Fowey. The heritage apple orchards have yielded cider there for more than 800 years.

But his wife’s cancer diagnosis meant they had to be near a hospital, so the family had never managed to live on the farm. After reading how Raynor and Moth needed a home, Bill told his wife he might have found their next tenants. “She looked at me like she was going to kill me and said: Don’t even think about it!” But Bill made the couple an offer to live on the farm for a very low rent with a small fee for helping out.

By this point, Raynor Winn was a bestselling author after the 2018 publication of her book The Salt Path, an account of her and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the South West Coast Path — a “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by the sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness.

It was at Haye farm that Winn wrote her second and third books during the four years the couple lived there. In the description for her second book, The Wild Silence, Bill’s offer is described as “an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story”, which “changes everything”.