Thread 3: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?^

Thread 2 Thread 2. To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

It really isn't unusual have a pen name, or to refer to yourself as that name in interviews- actors do it all the time. In a memoir it protects the family of those people, in this case their children .

I'm guessing though that they changed their names so the connection with the past wasn't recognised. However, they had no idea the book would even be published, let alone successful.

I

But she came up with some kind of story about how he was called Moth because of his eco-activism in the eighties and nineties, didn't she 🤔

I didn't get the feeling that they were noms de plume at all. More like running away from their (provable) past, and court records.

Yes, and said his real name was Ray, of all things!

Don't let facts get in the way of prejudice 🙄

I think it's pretty unusual to have your spouse take on your pen name though. OK the book was about both of them and they did publicity together so I suppose it would be fine without all the other murkiness. I do now think it was entirely to cover their real identity though.

This is one of the niche oddest things about it all. That and the obsession with a lone sheep which spans 2 books and a house raffle ad (so far).

Is she perhaps trying to minimise his involvement if it were all to come to light, as it now has? As in, it's not him, it's me, Ray, telling this whole tale? Or am I just desperately trying to find one redeeming feature about her!

Just reading the piece in Country Living that a PP linked to earlier. And this quote is such absolute self-agrandising bollocks:

When we arrived, the land felt abused and polluted, but we’ve been hard at work removing plastic sheeting, nourishing the soil and bringing wildlife back to the hedgerows. It’s become a big rewilding project – and it’s worked.

A year ago, there were no birds here. Now, there are woodpeckers, yellowhammers and blackcaps. It’s amazing how quickly nature bounces back if you let it. Like humans really…

I live in a town. A small one, but an actual town. And last week there was a woodpecker on my front lawn. Kites regularly fly overhead. And does she think there are no birds in cities?!

And how, exactly, did they "bring wildlife back to the hedgerows"?!

Also, are we supposed to believe that she and the ill Timothy Moth did all that themselves? Rescued this checks notes Cornish cider farm? All by themselves?

Lie, after lie, after narcisisstic lie.

(Remember, this cider farm is owned by a man who made a ton in the City. And yet Sally and Tim have come to save his established farm/orchard?!)

And now it is gardening and fresh air that is saving Moth, not walking:

Sounds like hard work. How’s Moth coping?

I like to think we're rewilding Moth as well as the land. By putting him back into his natural state – moving out in the fields all day – his health has improved almost miraculously, just as it did when we were walking the Coast Path.

As the landscape has become healthier, so has he. Nothing will cure his disease, but we’ve found a way to keep it at bay.

Lie, after lie, after lie.

www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/countryside/a64976957/raynor-winn-the-salt-path-interview/

@MissPeachyKeen I refer the good lady or gentleman to my post at 15.09 today.

If the Observer allegations about the Walkers embezzling £64,000 are correct, I am intrigued by what the money was spent on. Did they refurbish their barn? Did they use the money to buy the French property in 2007? Did they subsequently try and sell the French property to raise cash/repay their debts? Why does Raynor Winn claim on page 208 of TSP that "Everything w'ed ever worked for or towards in our years together was gone" and go on to add "When our friends were on foreign holidays, we were reroofing the barn". The Observer article claims that local residents in the village where the Walkers own a property, remember them visiting and staying in their caravan.

Many questions for the Walkers to answer.

"The farm was, however, a borderline ruin. The owner worked in London and had struggled to restore it as he had intended. In The Wild Silence, Winn describes the house as “oozing like a sponge, sucking up water when it was raining and squeezing it back out when it stopped”. She deals with a “town of mice” in the attic in a feat of athletics and courage that wouldn’t go amiss in a horror film. The land was worse: overworked and lifeless, Winn writes of a silent dusk, devoid of birdsong. “When we came, it was so grim,” she says. Winn speaks softly and with thought. Both she and Moth – teenage sweethearts – carry the Staffordshire accents of their upbringing. “There’s so much agricultural waste,” she continues. "The hedgerows were just dead, there was hardly any wildlife.”

Why do they keep living in a house that's borderline a ruin and then doing it up?

The whole thing just gets more bizarre.

Bit rude to the person who let them stay there too, I notice a bit pf a pattern of bring rude to people who have helped them, for example the other person who let them stay for the winter, weren't they rude about them as well?

I read this last night, and this bit in particular was especially hard going 😬😬 is there a prize for ‘twee-est statement of the decade’?

I like to think we're rewilding Moth as well as the land. By putting him back into his natural state – moving out in the fields all day – his health has improved almost miraculously, just as it did when we were walking the Coast Path.

She embezzled the money over a number of years so it wasn't a £64K lump sum. It might have been less than £10K per year so probably just used to supplement her salary for a nicer standard of living.

If they were getting tax credits on top of a small income it would not have been declared there, so they probably got quite a bit overall.

Wonder if HMRC would be interested in those years

Only half joking We could do with a timeline if anyone fancies having a go and is good at sorting factual information from things that should be taken with a pinch of salt. I would as I have worked with them in the past but I'm a bit short of time.

For example, we know that the house and barn in Wales was for sale in March 2011 for £435k.

It's fiction. A planned narrative arc. The farm they rescued stayed on is centuries old. I think it would have coped without them.

Haye Farm Cider

The farm was, however, a borderline ruin....Winn describes the house as “oozing like a sponge, sucking up water when it was raining and squeezing it back out when it stopped”. She deals with a “town of mice” in the attic in a feat of athletics and courage that wouldn’t go amiss in a horror film. The land was worse: overworked and lifeless,

I wonder if this isn't actually an embellished description of the French property.

@Catwith69lives - they couldn't sell the French property because they owed money in France. The French authorities had been pursuing them for non payment of fees and taxes.

Good call. Just like she used the plot of her novel as a basis to create the "true" story of their flight from Wales...

If people want to start posting some dates and what happened (I can't look through the lot of them!), I'll compile a timeline, and post it up.

I’m also curious about his student loan and if he’s paid it back (I think I know the answer)

I was wondering about a timeline too.

It's a long time since I read TSP; I've also read the Wild Silence (which I particularly disliked; too little nature and too much whining and being angry!)

But I thought they set off on TSP in Summer (?) 2013 -- I might be wrong. They spent how long doing that? I think they split it into 2 sections, interrupted by the Winter weather - where did they go in that 2013/14 winter? When did they complete it? Then they were in limbo for a while (where? how long?) before moving into the Cornish farm, and in the Wild Silence, SW writes about leaving the farm to visit her dying mother, and being present when her mother died.

Her mother's death seems to have been registered in the first quarter of 2015, which means in practice that she almost certainly died in Jan, Feb or March of 2015 (but it's not impossible that that timeline could be stretched back to mid Nov 2014).

I may be misremembering the times represented in the books - can anyone help?

Dave and Julie?

In Feb 2016 the property was listed for sale at £299,000 and sold in July 2016 for £280,000 according to information on the internet.

I don’t think those were commonplace when they did the walk about a decade ago.
Im about their age & have only had one for about a year.