Thread 10: 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...
Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn
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New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting. There are currently 10 items on The Observer website The real Salt Path | The Observer

To all - No saltiness. Keep to the path. 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 - from experience - this will only encourage them back to the threads. We have done amazingly well together for nine very interesting, very serious and very silly threads so far. I can't be here as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion walking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

Keep calm and eat fudge.

Thank you

I doubt they could afford this estate, and they probably don’t want anything smaller due to their massive sense of entitlement!

plus as I said, it fits more comfortably with their political narrative to still be able to say ‘but we aren’t homeowners!’

I don't really want to speculate on where they live now, but just want to note that the article says: "Built in the mid-19th century, the house is reached via a private drive, has at least five bedrooms and a substantial farmhouse kitchen. The land includes a private beach."
This doesn't fit with the actual castle itself.

The article also says that the estate has been in the same hands since it was bought in the 1970s. The 190 estate (with a castle and private beach) that somebody may be thinking of, was last sold in 2018....

And is in the wrong area. RW has said in interviews the vague location and it’s not the same as the 2018 sale.

It's been mentioned several times in these threads the area where they live, and it's a lot further west than Saltash.

This is in French!?

Oh, do you mean you think they’ve been living in this place since they left the cider farm, that it’s not just a post-Observer story bolthole? I assumed the latter.

The only clue to location in the DM story is that the Walkers ‘passed by’ on thejr walk and described its ’domesticated rurality’.

That phrase is used just after they’ve stopped at a café called Fat Apples, camped in a nearby woodland campsite, seen the SWCP halfway sign on Porthallow beach, and taken the ferry across Gillan Creek. They are camped ‘At the edge of a turnip field above the Helford River’ when RW says they’ve almost forgotten the wild exposed landscapes of the north coast in the ‘southern atmosphere of domesticated rurality’. They are watching yachts heading in to Falmouth, then they take the ferry across the Helford River and arrive in Falmouth.

But I think all that tells us is the place they’re staying in is somewhere on the south coast.

That article is nothing about TSP or the WinnWalkers but is a strange tale alleging that the large furniture retailer Conforama has been selling poisonous armchairs that have caused several deaths.

The DM article is at https://archive.ph/4C7ra

BTW I would like to make it very clear that I am not a DM subscriber.😀 I just looked on archive.ph & found that the DM page had already been archived. Whenever you find a paywalled article it's always worth looking as 9 times out of 10 someone will have already archived it.

Her husband Moth, 65, also appears – sitting in a chair reading the Old English legend of Beowulf in a sizeable conservatory.

Strangely, after thinking Oh that book again, I suddenly remembered a book just over there on my shelf. I opened it randomly and read:
He chose, and changed,
and as soon as he stood in that stunning gown
and its flowing skirts which suited his shape.
it almost appeared to the persons present
that spring, with its spectrum of colours had sprung
so alive and lean were that young man's limbs
(Sir Gawain and the Green Knight translated by ........Simon Armitage)

@MarianGrotto · 25/07/2025 13:16
I think it's hard to get any real sense of what he's like, because (assuming Raynor is the one solely responsible for the three books) we never get to see him other than presented through a Vaseline-y soft-focus glow of hero worship.
You get glimpses of him as a free-spirited, outdoorsy, blond-plaited 20 year old with eccentric dress sense (am still hoping that a photo of him in the bright cream-coloured suit in which he got married will surface somewhere)

I don't think there will be anything more to come out now. But I do think the stain will follow RW around. There will be an elephant in the room now at all of her future events/ interviews no matter how many people continue to fawn.

I presumed where they were actually living not just post observer but that was just my assumption.

your description matches the rough location mentioned in interviews

In another image she is seen holding a long-eared bat, a species thought to roost in the attic of the property. (DM archive)

Speaking as a family with protected bats in our attic (🙃), I found myself thinking 'I hope she had permission to handle that bat'!

Oh, you may well be right, if it matches the rough location given in interviews. (I don’t know that part of Cornwall well.) I assumed the opposite on no real evidence.

Renting is also far more conducive to the next midnight flit, when all the people they've wronged, still unpaid creditors, and now media too come a-knocking to hold them accountable.

Something else that came to me. The mentions in TSP of her “nose peeling off” dramatically at least three times would have left her permanently disfigured and in need of hospital treatment if it was as bad as she described. Yet I can only detect very light sun damage in her photos (in some, none at all). Did they really do the walk at all?

Private Eye’s diary by Craig Brown is VERY funny this week.

Yes I remember the village with a short name previously mentioned here and it is near Gillan creek. I had assumed the private beach mentioned in the DM article must be a river beach rather than coast.

Those interviewed in the DM article say they have been there 1-2 years and refer to it as ‘up there’ so it must be elevated with farmland and woodland leading down to the river beach and a pool too. Sounds idyllic.

The DM archive report quotes locals as saying that Raymoth/Saltim have lived in the current place for more than a year, less than 2 and from before all this fuss. Dates of Salray's Instagram posts in the report seem to back this up. It isn't just a bolthole found to hide out because of the Observer reports.

Thanks to all pps for not posting the exact location of or links to their current resting place.

Just had a thought about Sally saying Moth's real name was Ray.

A poster said they were sure they'd read it in the book.

I first read it in an interview, the format went interviewers name, question. Author's name, answer. And so on.

But I haven't been able to find that interview.

And the only evidence now of her saying it seems to be the Independent article where the writer mentions it, and she isn't quoted as saying it directly.

Handy.

My guess is that Wonderl4nd is right.

Chloe H's interview from Australia seem3d to have a rather different approach from her Guardian reporting, emphasising that the book doesn't purport to be an autobiography. UK press reporting re the "Winns"' past lives might now have been quietly prohibited, eg, on grounds of privacy. Time will tell.

Perhaps in the now-redacted/postponed MS of On Winter’s Hill, they would have emerged as rewilding the estate/individually tending the endangered bat population/running a retreat for nature writers or exhausted free spirits still recovering from protesting the poll tax/protecting it from developers.

Or something.

I think legal letters have gone out citing that any further revelations are not in the public interest (as there reputation has already been damaged) and that further stories would be tantamount to press harassment. I think the Observer has not published anything now so as not to be accused of a witch hunt.

BUT if On Winter Hill is published I imagine it will be pored over for the health and other details and PRH will have to do a lot of fact checking and editing to make it bulletproof. They may just decide not to bother publishing and the Walkers may agree to having it shelved so they can let their notoriety blow over. I imagine the festival bookings, public appearances and charity work are gone forever though so they can just retire in their (rented) luxury property.

This. I've always wondered if they'd get through a purchase without alerting those they owe money to, or other interested parties. And that's why they haven't risked it.

I think Land Registry is a bit like wills, search, pay, and you get the info.

I imagine the festival bookings, public appearances and charity work are gone forever though

I'd say that was definite, too. Far too many people would be wanting to interrogate her if she made a public appearance.

I'd like for anyone she owes money to to be reimbursed, and the French property (properties with the brother's pigeonnier) to be sold, enabling someone else to restore them.

Chloe is being very specific about the literary genre, I feel, to show how careful and precise she has been. Wikipedia defines:

A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on the author's memories, feelings and emotions.

Exactly.