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

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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.

2023 I believe. Walked it

Actually, I just realised that this is the only place where I've seen Raynor mention a sibling -- I'd thought she was an only child because she describes a very solitary life on the farm with rather strict parents.

https://thebookery.org.uk/interview-raynor-winn/

The rural farming community I was living in was a world of tradition. Farmers’ daughters married farmers’ sons, my sister already had and I was expected to do the same.

I was really just covering us and trying to be sure we didn't get into trouble here :-)

'I think the bloody WalkerWinns may be influencing my whole thought process these days. Today I was at a funeral (of a 99 year old) and at one point the vicar said that she'd "walked a long way along life's path", which just made me think of RayMoth and this thread (Yesterday from our Fudge Correspondent)'

Same here.

I read a newspaper review and recommendation of a new walking book. My thought: Hmm, I wonder how much of that is true.

On a walk with a DC we could hear a loud and constant buzzing sound as we passed through a deep coppice wood. My thoughts: The hive mind. I hope they are all behaving themselves back on the thread. We also saw many ants beetling (anting?) about their business on the track. My thoughts: Ant art. I wonder if I should give them my pencil and notebook.

Afterwards we went for tea and cake at our rural community volunteer-run café which also operates as the village shop and supports a local food bank. I imagined the tea garden full of you all. I thought it would be nice to put faces to all the usernames and that we are all probably very different to how we would imagine.

When I wake up in the morning my first thought is usually of a peaceful cup of tea before the rest of life takes over. My first thought this morning: Oh cripes, I'd better log on to MN in case that chatty lot have filled up another thread.

Not quite, but it looks like I've got a bit of catching up to do whenever I get the chance.

I grew up in a farming community. My immediate family are not farmers but some of my relatives are,however they are landowners too. Many of the farms in or near to my village were tenanted. Some were council owned and others rented from large landowners. I seem to recall that the farms were passed through the generations with the exception of a couple of council owned ones,one of which was bought a few years ago and is now privately owned.

Thank you for this, am just reading TWS where RaySal's mother was dying and I was thinking that I had read somewhere about a sister marrying a farmer and wondering where she was or why she wasn't mentioned.

Then I was trying to work out where I had read it, here on one of the 9 threads X 40 pages or in one of the many linked articles/podcasts, or had I just dreamt it (it has been known!).

So thank you for posting and saving me from uncertain memories or a looooooong time searching.

It's literally the only place I've come across a reference to any sibling of Sally's --and you're right, assuming she's still alive, you would expect her to have been at their mother's death bed in TWS, especially if she married a (local?) farmer.

Though I suppose it's perfectly possible that the sister simply asked not to be included in TWS.

Or wasn't crazy about their mother's death being used as material for a flight into nature-related nostalgia interlude in the difficult-second-album style follow up to a bestseller.

Or that they're very different people, with very different memories of their childhood and different relationships to their parents, especially if the sister (who must be older. if she'd already married when Sally was 18) had 'done what was expected of her' and married a farmer, whereas Sally found herself a rackety eco-warrior townie.

Another Psychologist here! (as well as drinking game correspondent)

While listening to LL, I have been wondering about the possible role of health anxiety: catastrophising, misinterpreting symptoms etc. For any people in their 50s, it wouldn’t be surprising to have aches and pains, mild
memory lapses, fatigue etc - and with some kind of neurological condition having been diagnosed (potentially a lethal one) it would be so easy and understandable for SalRay or Timmoth to read more into benign twinges, pains and weariness than is merited. It could also explain why Timmoth feels worse when not working and inactive - no distraction from anxious thoughts, lots of time for rumination - but when walking, the sense of purpose and activity distracts.
Not suggesting that the symptoms are all in his or Salray’s head as there have been scans etc, but possibly exacerbated by health anxiety…
But if this were the case, as Salray says, she probably wouldn’t have therapy as there would be “too many questions” 😊

Back to their house in Pwllheli, this is a picture of the outbuilding that they converted, sometime between 1998 and 2002 I don't know how much work they did themselves, but it does look like it was in a rundown state, and would have cost a fair bit to do up

https://www.pressreader.com/uk/irish-daily-mail/20250712/281925959032863
This makes for a good read

Cornish correspondent here (or one of them). I have it on excellent authority that the Walkers are holed up, and the paps have lined up long lenses. Can’t say more…!

Oh, and it had also occurred to me that 'Polly' in TSP, who lets the Walkers live in her outbuilding for the best part of a year, and gets Sally a job with the shearers, might actually be her sister.

No evidence for that, other than that Sally doesn't appear to have any friends, yet had been in touch with Polly after they'd been evicted, Polly has her phone number, knows they're on the path, offers them somewhere to live, and Raynor says they'd supported one another through 'teenage crises and adult anxieties'. Also, she has a farm 'in the middle of the country', which would fit with a sister who'd married a farmer in the midlands.

That's pure speculation, obviously, but someone did say that the 'Jan' who lets them stay with her before they start walking and stores their van, was probably Moth's sister, but is described as an 'old friend' of Moth's.

Ah, I see… we’ve not accused them of lying. Thanks :)

Thanks for sharing this - I hadn’t read it before. I actually enjoyed reading it, and it made me want to believe in the story they’ve told us about who they are in the books and interviews they’ve given. Reading that article, I can see why so many journalists and readers were taken in by them.

I thought this very same thing. Makes sense if her sister married a farmer, assuming they still farm. Although it's not an issue for the story.

They're very cute 20something newlyweds, aren't they?

I love Sally's pig jumper, woolly hat and curly blonde fringe, and Tim's dapper-but-slightly-disturbing tweed, cravat-and-short shorts climbing outfit. (Maybe it gives slight lederhosen vibes?)

No, it's not. I think my line of thought is just why there was no reference to her sister, if still living, at their mother's deathbed in TWS, and whether the sister had asked not to appear in the book, which I can understand.

She might similarly have wanted her identity disguised in TSP (especially as Sally helpfully points out to her prospective tenant who is going to move into the renovated meat packing after them that it has no planning permission.... If she were identified by name, so would the lack of planning be identifiable by a random ill-wisher...)

That's a bit cruel of the press.
If SW did base the whole premis of her book on lies then I think that warrants press attention however I do think 'Moth' is genuinely ill a fact which if SW does make any further comment I'm guessing she'll use to detract from her own part in the mess.

I had also been wondering whether RaySal heard a vague 'showing markers for CBD, some similarities' diagnosis and instantly catastrophised by jumping immediately to 'Moth has CBD', which then became an absolute in her mind? Giving her the benefit of the doubt, maybe she firmly believed that he DID have CBD and she overlooked any evidence that he didn't, seeing only anything that reinforced her own anxieties.

She would then have seen almost anything, from symptoms of a mild virus to the effects of ageing, as confirmation that this was what he had, and she may STILL believe that he 'cured himself' by their extensive walking, if he hasn't been further diagnosed, got any worse or, indeed, died.

@Cornishwaferi think you’re right. I think the way to avoid this is for the Walkers to have made a better job of telling their (revised) story. I’m not going to give away the location. But upthread people were wondering why journalists hadn’t found the Walkers. The update is that they have.

Paps will photograph anything they think they can sell. Or if not paps, then Cornwall-based photographers, or indeed anyone with a camera and an opportunity. Or, for that matter, someone with a camera phone who spots one of the Walkers coming out of the local shop with a pint of milk.

The Daily Mail would adore photographic 'evidence' that Tim Walker was hale and hearty, for instance. I'm not suggesting for a moment that he's not ill, as the medical letters clearly suggest he has a potentially serious condition, even if it's presenting atypically and developing unusually slowly, but you can imagine the gleeful DM headline FAKE TERMINAL SALT PATH MAN SINKS FIVE PINTS ON A YACHT or whatever.

I imagine they're sticking close to home and making sure they keep the curtains closed.

I won't ask you where it is, @Cornishwafer (though I have a feeling you or someone else mentioned a placename many threads ago which I will not repeat), but are journalists/photographers really staking them out?

Presumably they have ample supplies of food, and will just stay indoors, preferably in a house at the end of a long lane with a locked gate, and wait them out?

I've been holding off from telling this story because it is, "Outing" in Mumsnet language but I'm past caring now.

Many years ago, I was written about in a Tissue of lies autobiography by a very, very casual (saw him at most half a dozen times) boyfriend.

It was a kind of, "Young man's coming of age" book, self published and utter nonsense from start to finish by somebody that everybody in our friends and co-workers group knew to be at the very least, prone to embellishment.

We were all it, of course, very thinly disguised and all of us were outraged.

It has to be said that he wrote in quite flattering terms about us all but only in the sense that at soon as we clapped eyes on our hero, we recognised his potential greatness and were falling over ourselves to be his mentor, his greatest friend, his hapless wingman at parties, or to lend him a tenner.

It probably only sold a couple of hundred copies and most of the fools that did buy it were us. Curiosity getting the better, as it were.

I, of course, was the love interest and very embarrassingly portrayed I was too. I was absolutely livid for months.

Not that I got any sympathy. "He's made you into an f'ing Bond Girl, I come off as Baldrick." said one disgruntled fellow.

Yes, not pleasant for anyone being holed up with the press outside. But they need a strategy; burying their heads in the sand doesn’t solve their problems.

I agree that RW is going to make Moth’s health issues the primary concern, and will try to garner public sympathy by focussing on that. But given that it’s evident his condition was no where near as extreme as she made out, and he certainly wasn’t a couple of years away from death, she’s going to have to tread very carefully. And it won’t go down well if she tries to blame the recent revelations for any decline in his health.

ultimately if the Hemmings’ account is to be believed (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t be) then her actions caused extreme distress to their family, and I believe Martin Hemmings was not a well man either.

@gattocattivowell quite. It would seem they haven’t moved from where they were living, and have done no more than issue that one flimsy statement. Access to the property is challenging, so they haven’t got lenses trained on windows or anything. But photographers are in the vicinity.