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 wonder if anyone they know has ever described them as pathological liars....

Yes, this is my line of thinking. They come across as financially ridiculously naive, but massively entitled. So it’s quite plausible they made investments - probably badly - leaving them in the shit which could have been the start of the embezzlement. If she had the mindset that ‘everyone else’ ( Tim’s brother, Martyn Hemmings et al) was loaded and that it was unfair that she was struggling (victim mentality) then she’d justify her actions that way.

and a bit of conflation, a bit of distortion and hey ho, she’s rewritten the narrative, convinced herself it’s the ‘unflinchingly honest’ account, because hey, it’s ’her truth’….

Regarding the chateau, the brother and family didn’t move permanently to France until 2008. They bought the chateau in 2006 and between 2006 and 2008, renovated during the school holidays. However this was difficult to manage.

So they decided they wanted to live in France full time, also because of the lifestyle and for the children to learn French. The whole family were keen to move.

The brother had always loved chateaux and wanted the challenge of renovating one.

(above from French article).

I think at this point, the brother and family got swept up in this new project and had the idea to sell the farmhouse/pigeon to the Winns, if indeed he did own both properties which I think is most likely (the properties are one plot). Maybe a local developer heard that the family had bought a chateau and made them an offer for the farmhouse/pigeon. Then the Winns decided they wanted in on this French property lark and offered to buy the properties but could only afford the farmhouse and not the pigeonniere at the time.

Then the embezzlement was found out and the Winns could not return to France. If the brother owns the pigeon and only lives 40 mins away, which is nothing for rural France, then why isn’t the Marie of village du dropt chasing him for the overdue tax?

According toe DM article, letters asking for payment of tax on the farmhouse that TW and SW owned were sent to the brother at his chateau but they were returned unopened. The current owner of the Walker's Welsh farmhouse , who bought it in 2016 also received letters asking for tax payment.

It’s not that there’s a year ‘missing’ as such, just that the whole point of them going back to the path for the second stint, after the months at Polly’s, is because Moth has been accepted onto a degree which will start that autumn - we’re told they have two months to fill before the student loan comes in in late September 2014, and they can’t rent anywhere will they have it. So the move to Polruan and Moth starting his studies is supposed to follow immediately on from the end of TSP. But he doesn’t in fact start the degree till a year later. One does wonder how they lived for that year, given that Raynor says several times at the start of TWS that she hasn’t worked other than on their Welsh ‘farm’ in twenty years, and presents Moth as incapable of work.

Oh, and just to be devil’s advocate — I don’t ever remember the eco warrior explanation of Moth’s name as occurring in TSP, which I have in paperback and on Kindle. I think I only saw that on here, in a reference to something said in an interview.

I definitely remember reading it in TSP
Weirdly it was pretty much the only bit of the book that felt vaguely plausible to me

Not disputing any of this but just checking, do we know precisely they had that level of mortgage? Can you remind me where this info is please?

That's the Landlines "walk". A few holes in that have been raised in these threads...but apparently RW wrote in the book they sometimes got taxis and they also used bikes.

For those interested in the journalistic/ legal aspects of this story, as well as RW's continuous refusal to engage with the Observer, there's an article in the Press Gazette today:
'On Sunday 6 July The Observer published allegations that major elements of the book were fabricated or misleading, including that the couple had embezzled money and that there was scepticism around Moth’s illness.
The Observer’s head of investigations Alexi Mostrous told Press Gazette the story “raised certain issues that could have legal ramifications and editorial issues”.
“There was an argument that, because [Raynor] had never faced charges or a criminal prosecution, she was entitled to privacy,” he said, “but there’s some journalist defence [against] that.”
He added there was “countervailing public interest” when looking at the “disparity” between how Moth’s illness had been presented in the book and what Hadjimatheou was being told by neurologists.
“One of the arguments that we put forward was that CBD sufferers could have been given the impression that walking or communing with nature could make a real difference to their disease, whereas we were being told that it probably wouldn’t.”
To tackle the legal hurdles, The Observer attempted to communicate with the couple “as much as possible, mainly through their lawyers,” Mostrous said.
“We’re keeping that channel open because we’re continuing to publish. They keep asserting their rights to privacy and dissuading us from publishing.
“We tried numerous occasions all the way through the investigation to meet them – we’ve tried very hard, despite what Raynor said in her statement.”
https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/nationals/inside-the-observers-salt-path-investigation-legal-hurdles-ai-book-and-putting-new-version-of-paper-on-the-map/

It's in the original Observer article by Chloe H

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

Mandela effect?

I know a Moth-short-for-Timothy, and can think of another in fiction, so the name Moth never really struck me as needing an explanation as such (I was far more struck by the quite stagey name Raynor Winn) — not that I consciously thought ‘He’ll be Timothy on the birth certificate, but if asked, that’s what I’d have guessed. My (admittedly fairly limited) experience of environmental protest in the 90s suggests the existence of an awful lot of Gazzas and Pauls, certainly more than Swampies or Moths. Though I met a Bear who was into shamanism.😀

No because the property business didn't exist till 1999. The investment was either elsewhere or never happened.

Not engaging with the journalists seem very ill advised.

Going back a bit about eco-protests, I would rule out Moth's involvement in Greenham even though it included men in the earliest days of the protest. I think, had he been one of men involved at the start, we'd have heard about it from the Winn/Walkers by now, especially if he'd been told to leave. Men's involvement moved to supporting from a distance: childcare, fundraising, publicity and the like, as well as protests through mixed anti-nuclear groups and later, with Cruisewatch when the Cruise convoys left Greenham to 'merge' into the countryside but were followed by protesters away from the peace camp. I think most outside Cruisewatch groups were local to the areas on the convoy routes. Response times had to be quick so wouldn't have worked for anyone living too far away.

This is from a Guardian published timeline (pdf link is shown here https://www.theguardian.com/yourgreenham/chronology/0,,2071806,00.html). From memory, this fits with what I recall but I haven't officially fact checked:

March to Greenham

On 27 August 1981 a women-lead group called ‘Women for Life on Earth’ left Cardiff to walk to Greenham Common, demanding a televised debate on nuclear weapons. 36 women, four men and several children walked 120 miles; it took them ten days.

The modest peace march was largely ignored by the media, so, on arrival at the base, some of the women chained themselves to the gate in attempt to generate publicity. None of the marchers had intended to stay, but several women decided to remain at the base until their dissent had been acknowledged.

The women eventually acquired tents, bedding and cooking utensils. A permanent peace camp was assembled.

In the decade that followed, the women did hundreds upon thousands of actions in order to keep the nuclear issue at the forefront of the public’s imagination. Their actions generated thousands of newspaper headlines – from symbolic individual gestures like hanging baby boots on the perimeter fence, to huge coordinated actions involving millions of women worldwide – the protests of the women of Greenham forced the nuclear debate into political discourse.

Peace camp becomes women only

In February 1982 it was decided that the protest should involve women only. Although this policy would be continually debated, the argument was persuasive – the women only nature of the peace camp gave women space to express their beliefs and assert their politics in their own names and traditions without the customary dominance of men.

Many women considered the notion that men left home to go to war, to fight for the women and children they left behind, was an image abused by successive governments. ‘Not in our name’ was a popular slogan and many women felt that they could leave their homes for ‘peace’.

Weird. I guess she hoped it would just 'blow over'. On the other hand, assuming all this is true, it would be a risky business to engage because a good journalist would insist on her answering questions properly or would be reporting that she was evasive..

I don't recall if this blogpost from 14 July has already been posted. It's by a man who has walked the SWCP. He admits he hasn't read the whole TSP or seen the film, but has read enough extracts and reports to form a view that their account of the walk and the people they encountered doesn't ring true.

He is critical of the title itself, which more properly belongs to a torally different sort of trading route leading inland, and recommends reading about those.

And he describes his own encounters along the way, as a ragged, unkempt and probably smelly skinny bloke weighed down by a rucksack, to whom people offered kindness without prompting.

And comments acidly on the account of the last 400km:

Essentially the last 400 kilometres of the Winn’s walk is done in reverse and covers only fifty pages, including lists of coves and headlands in a rush to close the final gap in the journey. The memorable parts of this section for anyone doing the whole journey are the number of river crossings, which get brief mention in The Salt Path and are described as ferry crossings as this was done in peak tourist season. There was no wading in floodwater or being rescued. Many of the smaller ferries cease operation after summer, forcing you to negotiate your way across, or around, estuaries.

He isn't healthier by the end of his walk, and has lost 2cm in height. It's a long read, but I like the title: The Salt Path: a walk without a moral compass.

Quite a bit of the post goes over things all too familiar with anyone following these threads. It's his personal experiences that count.

(Oh, and he does have a book to sell.)
https://anyporthinastorm.com/index.php/articles/15-the-salt-path-a-walk-without-a-moral-compass

Yes, they buy bikes at one point and then post them home to Cornwall when they’re done with that part, and there are several places in the Scottish part of the walk where they are upfront about using taxis.

I have no issue with that, it’s just that Landlines presents Moth as extremely ill at the start — he falls in the orchard, sleeps all the time, and can’t even walk a two-mile loop on roads around the cider farm, and walking the Cape Wrath trail is supposedly Raynor’s desperate attempt to fire him up into walking himself back to better health. It isn’t even clear at the start he can manage that, and the decision to keep walking south is explicitly presented as a series of on the spot decisions, driven by Moth, each time they reach the end of a particular LD trail. This is reinforced by the fact that they drive in their van to the start of the CW trail.

YET someone linked on here an interview with Raynor, done before the Landlines walk, which says ‘this spring they will talk 1000 miles from the tip of Scotland back to Cornwall.’

So which is it, a single planned walk of a couple of hundred miles to try to provoke a dangerously ill man into exercising himself back to health, which spontaneously turns into a series of walks which end up walking them home?

Or, as that interview suggests, a conscious pre-plan to walk the entire length of the country to provide material for a book, though that is something that can’t possibly have been planned in advance if Moth were in reality as ill as he’s presented at the start of Landlines?

Head buried firmly in sand again.
it’s like the hiding under the stairs when the bailiffs were knocking on the door. Or sticking fingers in ears lalalalalalala…..
I reckon there’s such deep denial of reality that this is the ‘coping strategy.’

Obviously it’s not going to work. I imagine there are plenty of people (relatives, former work colleagues and neighbours) who have plenty of tea to spill.

I think there is pretty much a missing year based on inconsistencies in TSP. I've corrected part of the timeline above. The biggest question is how they afforded rent without the student loan.

2014 mid-July resume walk after Polly's (TSP)

2014 late Sept finish walk at Polruan (TSP)

2015 Early Sept start course, usual start of academic year. (TW is still in first year in July 2016, archive BBC)

Note in TSP RW wrote she told Polly about Moth's university application before they leave. She follows by writing:

"We wouldn’t be able to rent anywhere yet as we needed to wait for the student loan to come through in late September. We had over two months with nowhere to go and Moth’s health was at its lowest point so far. With two hundred pounds left in our pockets we loaded the van and said our goodbyes. But I could already feel the wind in my hair."

My Cornish spy confirms that they are indeed living near the village mentioned by a PP a few threads ago, and the house is allegedly owned by a third party. Is there some legal reason why they can't or won't buy?

Perhaps they are sponging off another well-wisher with freebie accommodation?

I think there is pretty much a missing year based on inconsistencies in TSP. I've corrected part of the timeline above.

2014 mid-July resume walk after Polly's (TSP)

2014 late Sept finish walk at Polruan (TSP)

2015 Early Sept start course, usual start of academic year. (TW is still in first year in July 2016, archive BBC)

Note in TSP RW wrote she told Polly about Moth's university application before they leave. She follows by writing:

"We wouldn’t be able to rent anywhere yet as we needed to wait for the student loan to come through in late September. We had over two months with nowhere to go and Moth’s health was at its lowest point so far. With two hundred pounds left in our pockets we loaded the van and said our goodbyes. But I could already feel the wind in my hair."

So RW writes Moth is going to start studying in Sept 2014...but in reality he started Sept 2015.

I agree. I'm now wondering if the 1990s property investment was really just them buying Pen-y-maes. A factual basis of another lie.

Could one of their children have written the Gangani stuff?

That was my impression. Those fake CVs for the fake employees of Gagnani Press seem like they were written by someone younger than the Walkers.

Thanks for that. It seems Incredible that someone can put their life out there for all to see and read in three books, a film and interviews, then claim a right to privacy when some of the narrative is questioned.