Thread 9: 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 ...

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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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 visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight 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.

@Witharelle @User14March

I just had a look at the video and firstly I think the house was wrong for them. They needed to use both house and converted barn to achieve what they wanted in terms of entertaining space, and I wouldn’t buy for that reason (I might find other ways to live, though!) because it’s a separate building- imagine at Christmas having to run from one to the other with presents and turkeys, or keeping two kitchens well enough stocked to be able to cook easily in the second one. Nightmare.

However I can see the resemblance between Jamal and Moth! Definitely! Diana doesn’t look similar to SalRay and sounds very different too.

Honestly I can’t see anyone getting through the screening process to be on the show (either houses or buyers) without being legit but it’s a fun line of exploration.

I'm certain I've seen Salray refer to having a flock of sheep. But where I saw that, and indeed what "level of honesty" her words had, I couldn't tell you.

Portree is very beautiful and popular for couples outwith Scotland to be married there. Also a possible family link? Walker is a fairly common Scottish surname.
I’m sure I crossed paths with him many years ago but I might be mistaken. He gives off such a New Age traveller vibe.
Anyone here remember Raspberry Lane in the early 80’s?

I was rewatching The One Show interview. At start, Ray talks about the ‘financial dispute with a life time friend’. Jason interrupts her and she looks steely & quite angry when he does & when he says ‘you can’t say it, but I can. You were conned out of everything’. Maybe understandably but I’d be more emotional than angry. In breach of NDA? Is she worried here about consequences? By now, as this is the June of this year I think, the Guardian have been in touch.

Im sure I saw mention of a small flock and that would fit with smallholders as opposed to larger flocks. That said, it is possible to rent eg a hillside for rearing bigger flocks. Sheep subsidies were all over the place after the effect of Chernobyl on Welsh sheep farming in 1986.

Was from "the book", that most reliable of sources...

A few weeks earlier I’d owned my own home, my own business, a flock of sheep, a garden, land, an Aga, washing machines, a lawn mower; I had responsibilities, respect, pride …

A walk along the Coast to Coast Path

The Parallel Path by Jenn Ashworth review – a soul-searching walk across England | Travel writing | The Guardian
https://share.google/xv5UdUN18RzZU6ARc

On the One Show again, Moth presents very well in his cameo, with dramatic pauses etc. He seems very personable & charismatic as all report. He adds finally ‘not up to Jason’s standard is it?’. He’s being himself though, talking about their personal journey, not acting. Just a funny quip perhaps.

What Former Viewers and Participants Say
On forums re. Escape to the Country:

“We did it for the experience, not because we were moving.”

“We were told not to mention our actual plans on camera.”

“They filmed the decision section before we’d even seen the last house.”

“It was fun, but very staged.”

Source ChatGPT

Did you see him speak at the end of the Sophie Rayworth podcast? I felt that was less slick and more "try not to slip up, try not to slip up" territory.

I notice Salray in interviews often says, breathily, of raffle house (my name for it now) that they bought it as a ruin and "rebuilt it stone by stone". This latter bit parrots the book. Could be true, but seems like another exaggeration. Particularly when they had two very young children when they bought it.

In TWS, she says they’d bought a cottage on the ‘outskirts of the village’ while she was still living with her parents and renovated it, but she wasn’t ready to move in with him because of her parents’ disapproval, both of Moth and of them living together unmarried. She suggests this came to a head one day with one of her parents (oddly, she doesn’t say which) saying ‘I’m ashamed of you. You had so many opportunities to marry a farmer. What use is he to you anyway? He has no land. You’ll never be happy without land.’ She represents it as being as a direct result of this conversation that the got the train to Skye to get married.

I did wonder whether it was because you could marry in Scotland without parental permission younger than in England.

More evidence to support the Escape to the Country conspiracy theory is the inflated price of Raymoth's house compared to the other houses, which the couple seem to agree with:
@Witharelle "The couple are shown around pretending not to know anything about the property until we come to the interesting bit of them having to guess the market price. ‘Oh I can’t imagine it being anything less than 450K’ she says. His guess? 430K"
How can Raymoth's house be worth more than a property with 2.5 or 28 acres??

Interesting. Though in reality SW was 23/24 and TW was 25/26 years old so parental consent wouldn't matter

I think here he was caught genuinely unawares (?) Raymoth I think both heavily prepare for their pieces to camera or interviews. Some people naturally like to do this, including those with nothing to hide.

Was it my imagination though, or was there an air of Sophie almost calling Moth out? As in her feeling perhaps was he was there & a silent prompter or participant for the prior interview? A sense of don’t be shy, speak to me?

Definitely caught unawares. Yet he (probably) lies through his teeth saying he didn't know she could write (caveat, we don't know 100% she wrote house lottery book), so might not be lying.

She says at one point ‘I’m a farmer and a farmer’s daughter; the land’s in my bones. The end of August; September is coming when I should have the sheep penned in the corner of the field. Catching and upturning each one, trimming the hooves, dosing for worms, preparing the ewes for the ram. Turning the earth, reading for sowing the winter corn…’

And then it morphs into a childhood memory of eatching a ewe give birth.

It’s unclear whether she’s talking about penning her own sheep on their Welsh land, or her memories of living on her parents’ farm. It’s conveniently blurry. But obviously they can’t have been raising winter corn as well as sheep on 1.5 acres, though I suppose it’s possible they rented more land. It’s also ‘2 acres’ in TSP but 1.5 in the sales information…)

She does specify that they’d bought three lambs when her daughter was three, and Smotyn was the last survivor of the three — they’d sold ‘all the rest’ the year before they were evicted. In her episode of Private Passions she says that once they were taking a ram they’d borrowed back home when Bryn Terfel joined in from the street with a piece of music they were playing on their van radio, so they presumably did lamb those sheep, but it can’t have been more than a tiny number, not any kind of commercial enterprise.

We need to be careful attributing ill to Timoth's to-camera prowess.

He may or may not have CBS, but according to his consultant, he does have scans which show a depletion of the brain chemical dopamine, so that fits with his having a parkinson-type illness (however indolent it may be!)

These sorts of illnesses are associated with an increased risk of developing dementia. And if Timoth has an atypical variant, who's to say whether this might have an increased or decreased risk of memory problems?

If he doesn't speak much in public, or appears at all hesitant when he does, it's possible that however engaging he may be, he may be having problems "remembering his lines". I think we need to bear that in mind.

(as an aside, did anyone else see the very short video released this weekend of Fiona Phillips saying thanks for buying her book? She sounds fine - but the video is only 11 seconds long and it appears from description that her dementia is moderately advanced, and I strongly suspect that those 11 seconds of speech were hard-won).

Thanks to our Medical Correspondent @mauvishagain for that useful reminder.

That makes it slightly odder, then, that she was still living at home and so reliant on parental approval. Then I wonder if it was about not having an awkward family occasion with disapproving parents glaring. Easier to elope and do it at a distance.

It’s clear that her parents, at least, aren’t told about the elopement until they come home from honeymoon and show them the certificate.

Just reading the book now and I found it so cringey that she includes an ‘Aga’ in that bit…

Hi, I have come back for another bite of the fudge bar.

As I previously said I could not read the book due to really not liking her, as she chose to portray herself, and by extension him. I also didn't get the basic premise, Illness and 'losing' their house and, as I found her so judgemental, I could not be bothered to try.

Having browsed this thread I have realised quite how much her claiming to be homeless irritated to me. They were not homeless, in any meaningful way, they went on holiday. They had all of the social capital (sorry) that (most) street homeless lack. They had friends and family they could call on, they managed to arrange storage of their possessions, they travelled under their own steam to a friend. They had a whole bunch of resources they could have used to get themselves housed. Indeed they did mange this within a small number of months.

Cornwall, and the Uk, have a number of types of homelessness and they do not fit the bill. In Cornwall you have locals priced out and then the street homeless who have drifted down the country and face having to make do or turn around. Not all can manage that and hence get stuck in Cornwall.

I am not really sure how much I care about her backstory, I am sure they both faced a very real trauma after, allegedly, being caught stealing in the way they were. I really object to them, seemingly, piggybacking on the very real difficulties homeless, and thieves, face in this country.

My partner and I are currently booking b&b's as walk from the Lizard to Budleigh Salterton later this summer. We are both older than the Walkers and are looking forward to a friendly non-judgemental reception as we progress the wonderful coast path once more.

It's a few years since I read TSP but the very first doubt for me was the elderly sheep..was there something about not having a home for this old ewe until days before they had to leave? It struck me as dreadfully irresponsible not to have sorted this out way before..either by putting her to an animal sanctuary or even RSPCA. I really did not like this at all. But I may have forgotten the precise details.

Fandango52 · Today 15:51

Well, the extracts, I have seen, do read like a sort of mobile Aga Saga with @Spindleweed ‘elevated’ ‘communing with nature’ writing

...and a large amount of someone elses money