Thread 8: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

Well, this has turned out to be slightly longer than the dozen or so replies I expected when I started the first thread!

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

2nd Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer
https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer
‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Thread 6
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husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 7
www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5373425-thread-7-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

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 extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct 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.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for seven threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

Admit I haven't read the book or seen the film, not my sort of thing, but have been following the débacle like a true tricoteuse. I'm curious about the title The Salt Path. Did anyone else call the SWCP 'The Salt Path' before this book? If not, it's a great title. Pity about the story.

Picking up from comments at the end of Thread 7 - do buy and read Simon Armitages poetry books. He writes wonderful poems.

Yes I have a beautiful book of his poetry.

Thanks for the new thread.

For @DisappointedReader who thought their original post would only garner a handful of replies:

🎂🧁🥮🥞🍰🍥🫖☕️

None of it stolen!

Not as far as I’m aware. The title under which she seems to have sent it to agents was ‘Lightly Salted Blackberries’, from that anecdote where someone on the path gives them the ‘perfect’ blackberry to taste — ripe, and salted with sea mist. The agent, or maybe her eventual editor will have probably said ‘Title doesn’t work’ and made suggestions.

I live on the SWCP and nobody called it the Salt Path. Before this debacle I had been fearing a re-brand. Don't think that'll be happening any time soon now!

Is it the salt path because it’s a coastal path?

I think it would be odd to rebrand it from something that specifies where it is tbh

especially over a book that has been popular a few years but, ignoring this scandal, may have not been of interest in a few more. Sounds like bandwagon jumping

A great title for a book, I meant! Not in favour of rebranding the path AT ALL!

I read somewhere that it had been mooted. A ruse to bring more visitors to the area.

I always find him a slightly odd combination of blokishness and lyricism.

Walking Home (the book where he walks the Pennine Way trading readings for accommodation, food, and someone to transport his huge turquoise suitcase, the Tombstone, between stages) is a bit like that, too, but errs on the side of cheerily lugubrious blokishness.

Having just reread TSP, though, with its (supposed) £48 a week budget for all food and accommodation, I keep marvelling at how much money he gets in his sock at every nightly reading (he passes a sock rather than a hat) — he gets over £150 from one, And is clanking!0 when he walks from pound coins, and has a Tupperware in his day sack stuffed with notes!)

And how much the people ‘hosting’ him do! They pick him up from a pre-arranged point on the path, take him to their house, feed him, give him a room for the night, breakfast and the next day’s packed lunch, and have also arranged a venue for and publicised a reading.

Pretty much what ‘Grant’ and his ‘three beauties’ do for the Walkers, minus the massage!

I haven’t read Walking Away, SA’s book about walking the SWCP, but it does sound just about possible that ‘Grant’, vague,y aware of the terms on which SA was walking the path, genuinely believed Moth was SA ,who had somehow shown up on the wrong date, or missed his pre-arranged ‘host’ for the night, and thought he was trading overnight accommodation and food for a reading. (In which case Moth’s halfhearted rendition of ‘The Boy Stood On the Burning Deck’ must have been a bit of a damp squib…)😀

Anybody have any thoughts about how much of the SWCP they walked (irrespective of whether some of the events described were embellished)? Did they walk all of it, as described in TSP?

There is a photo in the Penguin article below which does show notes scribbled in the margin of the Paddy Dillon guide to the SWCP. The notes shown in the photo also correspond to the narrative in TSP between Porthcurno and Mousehole (p176-7). A lot of the details described in TSP (listening to the radio on the last day of the Ashes Test/ the dates of the SA poetry reading in St Ives etc etc) seem to fit in with the chronology of the narrative in TSP. So I am genuinely baffled.

According to the article, SW began writing TSP in Autumn 2016.

Where the Salt Path led next

Well, that actually makes that weird 'Grant' episode a bit less odd, if 'Grant' was aware that a poet was walking the coastal path, bartering readings against food and accommodation, and/or had read SA's book about walking the Pennine Way on the same terms, and thought that night's arrangement had fallen through when he encountered the Walkers near the icecream van.

It would also explain why he told them a tall tale about how he got started in wine and thought SA might use it for 'material'. Because lots of the Pennine Way book is about the people SA meets, some of whom have pretty strange stories. (One woman was trying to get clean from a drug addiction, knocked on a famously taciturn old man's door to try to retrieve some escaping geese, discovered he was really very nice, and they ended up getting married, even though he was in his mid-80s and she was in her early 40s.)

And why he was asking Moth about his next 'gig' and taking photographs.

(Raynor's take on it all is still weird, though. 'Why were these gorgeous young women here?' Well, one of them is married to Grant, and one is his PA and one is their nanny. Yes, possibly mildly surprising that a bald, gaunt man who wears socks and sandals has a 'stunningly tall, curly-haired wife', but the nanny and PA are, unless she's suggesting they're some kind of harem, just working for the couple, so their beauty isn't anything to do with Grant.)

What I don't get is why Grant or one of his beauteous blondes didn't employ Google to actually check what SA looked like if they were aware of who he was and what he was doing. Also, he was walking the path alone. I know people did at times join him, but I don't think they were tagging along for board and lodging.

I'm not over bothered about a possible tall tale like that, which to me quite possibly sounds made up to insert SA into their narrative/make it a bit more interesting, although given the level of dishonesty uncovered it isn't surprising it is being scrutinised.

Interesting that that article linked by @Catwith69lives says

This spring, they will walk the length of the UK – from the top of Scotland back to their new home

when Landlines very much presents it as an initial decision just to try to walk the Cape Wrath trail, because it's not clear Moth will be able to walk it at all, and says that the decision to keep going was very much a series of spur of the moment decisions made at the end of each individual trail, to keep going.

A skeptic would wonder how anyone could have confidently told a journalist they were going to walk a thousand miles from the north of Scotland to Cornwall when her own book of the experience later presents Moth as unable to walk a two-mile loop on paved roads before they set out.

(They also, according to Landlines, ask their obliging son Tom to look after their terrier for a month, but end up staying away for four months. Which, I would have said, was a long time to be absent from a farm you're supposedly running.)

Raynor also tells that journalist that she wrote most of The Wild Silence on the M5, dashing around between book events to promote The Salt Path. Reading between the lines, she was doing little or no work on the cider farm, and if Moth was accompanying her to events, neither was he. As well as it not exactly the rural idyll their brand depends on, it may suggest why there was a falling out with Bill Cole..?

A skeptic would wonder how anyone could have confidently told a journalist they were going to walk a thousand miles from the north of Scotland to Cornwall when her own book of the experience later presents Moth as unable to walk a two-mile loop on paved roads before they set

This stuff is so fascinating! It's an utter mess of inconsistencies .

Phew. After having to steel myself every day for the past eleven days, at last I've logged on to find the thread at a length I can easily catch up on! Thirty-eight posts? I can cope with that!

I suspect these threads are giving me repetitive strain injury of the eyes, fingers and eyebrows variety. I'm off to find a sock to wave around amongst you all and MNHQ for some serious compensation. I will even read to you all while I do it from my new tell-all book, The Salt Pith.

Please note that is steel, not steal, no sticky fingers involved here, honest.

A "Chat" Simon Armitage ode to the salt path controversy.

“Saltwashed Spin”
(after Simon Armitage)
She sold the sob story
in softback.
Bootprints in sand,
breadcrumbs for book clubs —
a myth dressed in North Face.
You call that homelessness?
Try piss-wet doorways,
pavement heat like a second skin,
eyes avoiding you like you’re made of knives.
Not this —
not B&B poverty with a view,
not pain with prose and a publicist.
They say she walked the path,
but not the one I know:
the one with piss-stained stones
and teeth kicked in for spare change.
Try selling your suffering
by the chapter.
Try sorrow with a book deal,
a film option,
a signing tour.
Try living rough
without an Instagram sunset
to soften the blow.
She had choice.
She had a tent and a husband
and the words to sell it all as brave.
We have cardboard.
We have syringes in doorways,
we have police boots in ribs
and no page count to prove
we matter.
Her cliffs were metaphors.
Ours are walls
no one lets us climb.

While I've not walked any of it, and so cannot scrutinise aspects of the route, I am very familiar with long distance walking and camping generally.

I posted a while back an inconsistency with the book chronology and real chronology, particularly around the fact that it can be deduced in the book that they stop the first leg in early October, meanwhile we know they were driven to Bristol on the 17th Sept. This creates a two week inconsistency, suggesting they either started earlier than August as they claim, more likely end of July close to when TW was surfing in Newquay, or they walked far quicker than they claimed.

We also have the inconsistency of the play they claimed to have watched weeks earlier on the path, yet in reality the play opened on the 16th Sept.

The Simon Armitage thing bothers me too. SA started his walk at the end of August according to publicity. Meanwhile Raymoth claim their walk started on a Thurday afternoon in August. If we are still believe they started in August, the aforementioned 2 week discrepancy means we must assume it to be the first Thursday which was the 6th Aug (other wise the time discrepancy would be 3 or more weeks).

Getting back to SA - while his plan to walk the SWCP was publicised in national media that year, I find it a stretch to believe people began to mistake Moth for him (irrelevant of the dubious likeness) so soon near the start of the Raymoth journey, at least two weeks before SA began. Would SA really have been so prominent in local people's minds as to even consider they'd seen him? And if so, they'd have known he was starting later due to whatever media publicity they'd seen.

LDW also requires a level of experience and despite their claims of having done lots of camping in their 20s, they come across as completely clueless in TSP, though perhaps that was for dramatic effect. At one point SW writes of guilt of getting a bus as if it's cheating. But cheating what? The feat of walking the entirety of the path or cheating Moth for denying him some extreme physio?

My best guess is they likely did the journey, but quicker than they claimed, probably by a combination of walking the easier bits quicker and getting buses/taxis to avoid some of the harder bits. Could they have even used a bag transfer company?...not sure such exists for SWCP but they do on other national trails. And I don't think anyone ever mistook TW for SA other than something they joked about between themselves.

Pretty much what ‘Grant’ and his ‘three beauties’ do for the Walkers, minus the massage!
We only have national treasure Simon A's word that didn't happen. I bet a massage would have been rather welcome after all that walking.

I've kept meaning to post the photo of Raymoth's Paddy Dillon annotated guidebook, so thanks to Catwith69lives for doing that.

What is your Salt Path name?
I am torn between Dis, Point and Oi. Dis and Point because I am politely dissing and pointing out porky pies in the TSP industry and Oi because on occasions I am forced to guide salty wanderers back on to the path.

This has really made my laugh.

Another good walking book is The Green Road into the Trees by Hugh Thomson. Musings on history and so forth.

But is it Stollen?

Thanks v much!

@AldoGordo someone makes point on Reddit thread that Moth reads Beowulf version via Simon A yet Ray doesn’t know who he is. Moth is carrying Beowulf from get go. Also the £28 he gets from the busking poetry reading sounds a lot.

Also @AldoGordo an apparent local talks about the part of path that’s shut off for the Army manoeuvres & says it only, rarely, happens for film shoots not the Army.

‘I think you’re ready for a cup of tea now’
’Ah wait..that penguin usually faces due north!’ :)