Thread 7: 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 ...

Second article in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

Third item in the Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

Fourth item in The Observer
‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Thread 6
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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be careful when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with possible visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail.
Keep on the path as we have done together amazingly well for six threads so far. No saltiness. Thank you.

If it’s true though, that final £600 was always going to be a problem, she allegedly knew the owner needed to use it the next day for wages and that she’s was the one he’d asked to deposit it. That bit of the story sounds odd to me because why would someone do that knowing they were going to absolutely get caught. And then was it just one day after that she allegedly turned up with the money from selling things? How could you sell things that quickly?

It also speaks to the approach she took with the medical experts she contacted for the story who gave general views: 'this is unlikely', 'I've never seen this', vs the actual neurologists who actually examined Tim/Moth

@champagnetrial the doctors who’ve been responsible for his actual care would not be able to speak to anyone about a patient without that patient’s explicit consent. It would be a striking-off offence, I should think, plus could be fined under GDPR.
General views are all you’ll get as a journalist, along with general disclaimers about ‘can’t speak for every patient’ ‘all diseases may present with unique features’ etc.

Did she know?

Yeah that's a good take on it and I'm inclined to agree.

I thought the implication was that she was allegedly told to deposit it in the bank that day because it was going to be needed to be able to meet the wages bill the next day, because they were now so tight on funds. They wouldn’t be able to pay other people’s wages.

On the £600 - she may not have known he was going to take it out Monday but she probably should have

i think it’s more likely she was desperate and had the cash in her hand so spent it thinking she would replace it before Martin went to the bank but she didn’t have it and ended up caught

a certain arrogance from getting away with it for so long

I think she was given the money on Friday and he was taking it out on Monday to pay wages - I think she thought she could replace it

I quite fancy a 25p pasty and a pork pie.

From the Times:

Instead of putting it in the safe, he asked Sally to pay it into the bank so on Friday he could do the wages,” Hemmings said.
When Friday arrived, Martin went to the bank to check the balance and there was not enough. The £600 was nowhere to be seen. Martin asked the bank manager to go through his accounts and found that more than £6,000 over several months had been written off in cheques with a signature aping his own.

Perhaps she didn’t know. It also says a short time after she turns up with the money, so maybe that’s not the next day either. If it happened, though, it’s still quite brazen because she would know that it was her that was supposed to deposit it. It not being there would be obvious. Also, if she was the bookkeeper, she would likely know they were going to be too short to make the wage bill.

Yes, perhaps. It makes you wonder what the desperation was to be allegedly doing it so obviously

Apologies if this has already been posted, but it did make me chuckle …. read on for nods to The Salt Path!

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/11/gregg-wallace-bbc-masterchef

Stand corrected - he wanted it on the friday

i think thieves can get brazen when they’ve not been caught for a while

She must have known funds were low though. I looked at the company accounts earlier and in 2008 it showed the "cash in hand" amount was something like £3! Other years it was generally around £12,000 and sometimes as high as £22,000 in the early 2000s (company started in 2001).

I didn't pick up on the lies in TSP, but I've just started listening to TWS and I've clocked she's a liar. (I know we know, but now I REALLY know)

The Rock climbing- you don't just let rope out. If he's leading up, which is what the belaying could maybe be, then he'd need to set up an anchor for her and she's be doing a different sort of climbing.

Her pronouction of everything up in the north of Scotland is dosgusting

But it's the idea they could walk from ulllapool to stac pollaidh and climb stac pollaidh in a day. It's 15miles, but it's STEEP. Its a stupidly steep hill straight out of ulllapool to the north, if she even attempted it she'd mention it. If you could walk it, it would be brutal and the whole day.

As Marina Hyde said last week, the nation has become obsessed with 'misery lit' and that includes reality TV of all sorts including Race Across the world. It all started with BGT et al with the sob stories as others have said.

Escape to the Chateau is another great example and shows like it. It really isnt hardship or adversity at all. It's middle class performative nonsense. I've also started to notice it in my recommendations on Audible. I'm finding it harder to find things that don't just totally annoy me. It's largely regurgitated, repetitive shite. There's just too much of everything out there now. I listened to a snapshot of a book called Midnight Chicken. I thought it would be a cookery book right up my street, but no, it is navel gazing misery personified. I love Miranda Hart, but even her latest book was all about how she had hit rock bottom but then found love and what worked for her - which wasn't actually that enlightening - and a disclaimer that she was actually still struggling a lot actually.

I changed my preferences on Audlble to Nature, and still it comes up with people finding the meaning of life via rewilding (or not, as the case may be) You just can't escape it.

Nobody really knows the meaning of life, and nobody has found any miraculous cure to any awful, lifelong (and certainly not terminal) illnesses, so I hope publishers will stop churning out this utter crap. Most of which is lies anyway.

The film is actually quite good. JI and GA are both very good in it, as you’d expect, and I’m glad I saw it. I’ve never read the book, although I would like to, just to see what it’s like! But I would recommend seeing the film. I saw it in the cinema, so paid about £15, but a few people on here are saying it’s now available to rent, so if you rent it and don’t like it, at least you’ll only have spent a few pounds.

But then she quickly finds the ‘wedding dress’ money to repay him I think?

Its odd that she didn’t just use that money in the first place, knowing that the cash was needed immediately to pay wages.

Is the path on Google maps?

I wrote a story involving climbing Snowdon, where I used Google maps to go up by one route, and a different route back.
My parents, who know the route well having climbed it a few times, wanted to know when I'd climbed it. I climbed a different path 30 years ago.

I highly suspect the wedding dress sale never happened. It was just another "playing the victim" fib to transfer some kind of guilt onto the Hemmings for making her sell something so precious.

Another day another thread 😁

Tim with his chelsea flower show garden - was that not mentioned in any of the books? I feel like that is the kind of thing that would be waxed lyrical over as proof of his unparalleled skill with nature.

I feel like with some posters the Winns can say what they like but everyone else has to be 100% perfectly accurate and have no ulterior motive that can be attributed to them. This is fascinating to me. Is it a need to play devil’s advocate? Or something else?

Meanwhile the real 'cash in hand' was in her hands.

Was it desperation? Or was it greed? Coercion? Compulsion? Jealousy? Or just because she could?

Totally agree. It was pure manipulation there won't have been any truth in it

Because she wanted it and she could I expect, because we know from the snobbishness over council housing that she would only accept a certain standard of living and from her statement last week there was certainly no remorse. So she probably felt it was her given right.

From the passage of TSP someone posted the other day which was all about what she wanted and to hell with Moth. To misquote a ginger fella, what Sally Ray wants Sally Ray gets.

Because those powder blue Rayburn's don't grow on trees ....