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.

I remember from TSP that she wrote about hanging out of the window at college watching Moth, sounded like she was obsessed with him from the moment she saw him.

Yes. I wonder what they both studied at college and what they worked at/as afterwards. She says very little in the first two books about Moth’s family or either of their career paths or much about the eco activism; it’s probably tangential to the story she was telling but I want to know now!

The fantastical and unlikely thought has crossed my mind that Moth is genuinely losing his memory and RW has reconstructed their past in the books as an ultimate form of gaslighting and erasing the truth. "No, your name is Moth and we lost our house because of a silly investment. Stop getting mixed up, here read my book again."

@AlertCat
”something something my husband Moth- real name Ray, Moth is a nickname from his eco warrior days in the 80s”
Rings a distant bell but might be strange Mandela like phenomenon like everyone thinking that they were hiding in a cupboard under the stairs. Or people thinking that Tim had passed away. I remember discussing them with my dad a while ago and we were saying "yes, I think he's gone now." Even if you type Moth Winn into Google, it suggests things like funeral or obituary

I think that bit is all from the Independent article, which says: ‘Moth – real name Ray, his nickname is a hangover from his ecological activism in the 1980s and 1990s – you will recall, was given two years at best after his diagnosis.’

www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/the-salt-path-book-journey-walking-coast-path-cornwall-devon-homelessness-a8502256.html

The opposite had occurred to me, mostly though because I have actually seen it done - convinced someone that their memory was going, and lots of people around them, by telling them that things they remembered were wrong - and also doing things to make them seem more confused:
"We popped in to see Joshua yesterday - oh don't say you don't remember it; your memory is getting so bad. Don't say anything to Joshua - he'll be so sad you don't remember."

"Moth, you know your memory isn't good. You're getting false memories. It upsets me when you say things that aren't true, and people will realise how bad you are if you contradict me. Of course I didn't steal any money - you know I can't do anything that hurts others."

But that is because I saw it being done on an elderly person rather than that I think it's likely.

Anyone heard of Münchausen syndrome or Munchausen by proxy

I think this is what I was remembering. I remember Googling while reading TSP as the name Moth was so odd and likely read this article, inserting the info into my memory of the book.

I think it’s both
https://observer.co.uk/our-events/uncovering-the-salt-path

Yes, she never says. If she was 18, I suppose she could have been doing A levels. He was a couple of years older so assuming not. The only times she talks about their studies, it’s skipping college to be together, or run off to the Peak District or Scotland, climbing.

I agree that he seems to have become the ruling obsession of her life very rapidly. I can actually sympathise with her parents. She said they didn’t like him because he was ‘lazy’, a ‘townie’, ‘not a farmer’, but I’d potentially be pretty alarmed too if my solitary, impressionable teenager developed an overriding obsession with a rackety wastrel and just borrowed all all his interests, whether that was climbing or eco protesting or dropping out. It seems fairly clear to me that if she’d fallen in with someone else, she’d have had an entirely different life.

Re-reading the bits of TSP where Moth talks about applying for university, I now suspect this narrative was retrofitted too (I.e he/they thought of this idea after the walk). It talks about him having enough time to apply to begin that year (2014), but he started his course a year later in 2015 (evidenced by the Hampton Court flower show article in 2016 stating they were all in their first year). I wonder how they lived for a year without the student loan? 🤔

As I mentioned before, Timoth has had a scan which shows dopamine depletion (this from the consultant letter) and illnesses which cause dopamine depletion (parkinsons etc) are associated with a higher risk of developing dementia. So he may indeed have memory problems.

I also had a thought about them not trusting people and not wanting to be the talk of the village etc. I'm assuming that the Walkers are not Welsh speakers, but they were living in a Welsh speaking part of the country. It would be oh-so-easy to imagine, every time that you heard your neighbours talking in Welsh, that they were talking about you - especially if you had even the slightest hint of a guilty conscience!

Perhaps Moth was doing a plastering course at college. Did the college do anything like that?

Yeah, that would be much more sinister and the ultimate gaslighting - hadn't thought of that possibility! Though, not forgetting Moth does appear to have some kind of neuro illness/disorder based on brain scans.

So Moth Winn is on Wikipedia with a date of birth as 1960/1961
Newbery bypass opened 1998, peak protest Jan 1996, almost 800 people arrested, I dont think he was part of that or Winchester bypass. So where was he eco waringering?
Greenham Common started 1981
Hunt sabotage?
PETA?
What is Moth's eco bent? They don't seem to talk about it. Just being a sixth former with a 'down with this sort of thing' badge?

Well spotted. I assumed that TWS started at Christmas of Moth’s second year, but you’re right, it was his first, and there’s a missing year between the end of TSP and the start of Moth’s studies (and the student loan).

TSP ends with them about to move into the Polruan flat and Moth about to start studying. The whole reason they go back to the path is to fill in the time between moving out of ‘Polly’s’ outbuilding and the loan starting — one wonders what happened.

(And it would make no sense if Moth is saying at the start of TWS that he’s just talked for the first time to a fellow-student and given their ‘cover story’, if he’d already been on the course for a year and a half.)

This from Daily Mail comments: I knew Tim back in the early 2000s when he worked in Plas yn Rhiw, not far from Aberdaron on the Llyn Peninsula, as head gardener. Also recall him talking about doing plastering work on a property in France at the time.

This led me to more about them then - this from 2004:

Tim came to the garden ten years ago. He was living in Staffordshire with his wife Sally and their two young children.......... and working for the family business as a master plasterer, but had a degree in botany. Law clerk Sally was originally from Gwynedd. It was when ....... one day managed to get out of the house and down the road on his own that they decided they wanted to live somewhere safer for children. Within three weeks Tim had resigned from work, their house quickly sold, and they moved to a rented house near Criccieth to begin their new life, before finding Pen y Maes near Rhoslan, the dilapidated house they were looking for, so that they could "restore a bit of rural Wales". It was, says Tim, "a life-changing experience to restore a house as a key piece of history."

Mine too, I must admit.
As you say fantastical and unlikely. 😉.

But maybe she's hoping it'll work as well on the great British public!

😀

In TSP, RW mentions them going to rallies for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (written as CND) in their youth - so probably that kind of eco-activism.

@mauvishagain @AldoGordo @MargaretThursday the apparent memory slips in Landlines do seem very tenuous & Ray quick to remind him his memory is going. He doesn’t remember their wedding anniversary etc but then she adds neither has she. Moth seems distressed when she points it out though.

But yes, medical scans are as described & conditions etc. Also as I progressed a bit further in book it turns out Moth did break his finger.

To add, in Feb 2015 their son posted on FB saying he helped them move "home" and was a nightmare because they had "loads of stuff". Could this have been them moving to Polruan? If so, there's quite a gap between end of walk and living there.

Well, he's not the son of Penny Walker but let's all take a moment to enjoy what an amazing woman this unconnectedPenny Walker obit lady was

Despite being the pigeonnier correspondent, I remain baffled by the French property angle. What we know from the Observer article and follow up DM visit to the village du Dropt appears to be as follows:

• a villager shared a photo with the DM of TW,SW and their 2 children, TW's younger brother and their 6 children dated from 2004.
• according to the villager, both families were involved with doing up a property in the village
• the photo suggests that the property they were doing up was the building adjacent to the pigeonnier owned by Martyn. According to the Observer article, TW and SW bought the property in 2007 to prevent it being bought by a property developer. SW's rebuttal statement suggests that they remortgaged their Welsh property to purchase the French property even though it may not have cost more than a couple of thousand euros
• in 2006 the younger brother, Martyn, bought a chateau some 40 mins away which he has been renovating for the last 19 years
• if,as seem likely, Martyn owned the property next to the pigeonnier in 2004, why did TW purchase it in 2007? Why did he never visit the property subsequently and why was neither the property he bought or the pigeonnier owned by his brother, ever refurbished?
• why did TW not make any attempt to sell the property they had bought in 2007 until 2013 when they were either on the brink of or had just been evicted from their Welsh home?
• if the younger brother owned both the pigeonnier and the adjacent property in 2004, why did he sell the farmhouse to his brother in 2007?

Photos from Google Earth (2022) appear to show the farmhouse owned by TW with a roof. The DM photos from 2025 show that the roof has collapsed. This suggests that in 2013 (when the Walkers were evicted from their Welsh home) the French property was in a sense habitable and that the roof has only collapsed in the last 3 years.

The very close proximity of the farmhouse and the pigeonnier suggests that at one point (when the younger brother Martyn bought it?) they were part of the same plot. It wouldn't make much sense to refurbish just one of the properties due to their proximity to each other. So what happened and why did TW and SW purchase the farmhouse in 2007?

One possible explanation is that the younger brother wanted to focus on renovating the chateau he had bought in 2006. Possibly his ability to access renovation grants/tax breaks from the French government to refurbish an historic chateau might have been hindered by his ownership of a second property in the same department, hence his decision to sell the habitable property, rather than the pigeonnier, to his elder brother. However, after the Hemmings embezzlement case occurred the following year, there was little if any chance of TW and SW either having the time or money to spend renovating the property they had just bought from Martyn when all their focus was making ends meet by running their holiday cottage business in Wales. Consequently both properties were never renovated and both fell into disrepair.

Feb 2015? SWs mother died at the beginning of 2015. Its long time since I read TWS but I think she wrote then of deciding to do the next walk at that point.

But if that's what they did, they weren't gone all that long as Timothy was seen by the neurologist 4 months later - and no mention was made of their having done these amazing treks, which you'd think would be a relevant think to talk about when being seen for a potential movement disorder!