Maybe Mothman was the Milk Tray Man in a previous existence, using his climbing skills to clamber in windows to deposit chocolate, his silver-blond locks glinting in the moonlight.
@BeguiledSilence, I don’t think we’ll ever see OWH as originally envisaged, unless SW donates her papers to an archive or something and researchers can have great fun comparing MS versions. I think it will need significant alterations to be published now. Assuming it will appear as scheduled in autumn 2026, I imagine said alterations are taking place as we speak.
But for what it’s worth, and from having skimmed what she’s said about it and the blurb, I imagine they’d realised that the ‘Moth in significant deterioration, must be healed by being dragged out to do ever more ambitious walks in which I work very hard to make us look like lonely, marginal underdogs despite now being comfortably rich and comparatively famous, and Moth turns out to do fine on the walk, anyway, after a lot of everyone worrying about his frailty’ had gone as far as they could push it.
OWH will have had the usual scenes in which SW registers TW’s increasing frailty and tries her old techniques of leaving OS maps lying about to inveigle him into another, last walk — ‘because it’s always worked before, hasn’t it? We’ve staved off the inevitable, we’ve conquered fear and pain and self-doubt via the healing power of walking and tapping into the wildness in our hearts etc etc.’
But this time, TW (whom I should call Moth here, because he’s essentially a fictional character) will say no. ‘No, Ray. Not this time. I’m done. We need to face the inevitable. I’m tired of fighting. We need to accept what’s coming.’
‘No!’ Raynor cries, looking into the tired eyes of the man she’d loved since he was a cocky blonde ecowarrior in tweed shorts. ‘No! But it’s the Coast to Coast walk, that we talked about in our very first conversation as you dipped your Mars sexily in your tea!’
‘You go without me, this time, Ray. Me and Monty, the runt of the litter whom we rescued because of all the love in our hearts, will look after one another.”
’No!’
But she does, eventually. ‘I had to accept that I would walk alone from now on. That the hand I’d held for decades was no longer in mine. I had to walk towards acceptance. I had to walk alone, in winter, as a solitary woman, mourning a lost togetherness, bowing my head in the sleet that careened wildly around the wild fells etc etc.)
I assume there will also be something about leaving the cider farm. ‘We had healed the land. It was time to let someone else do the easy stuff, like making cider, and find a new home, like migratory birds, drawn on by instinct, though our real home was always by one another’s side.’
And there will be some quipping about doing the Coast to Coast ‘backwards’, so she is walking home. But she has found healing on the walk. In the harsh weather, in the darkest time of the year, she accepts the healing cycle of nature, which eternally dies and is reborn etc etc. And she should have arranged to walk through the solstice, ‘weathering the darkness as the earth turns back towards the light, even though we can’t see it yet.’
I’m actually impressing myself here. I could ghostwrite OWH in case SW has run out of inspiration.