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

It won’t be released as originally written, certainly, but I can certainly imagine a different book, one that purports to be a true account, setting the record straight, being published, if not with MJ then with another publisher.

Probably with some walking in it. Could even be the walk that was in On Winter’s Hill, but rejigged as a sort of penitential pilgrimage towards truth. What a lot of readers liked in TSP was the redemption narrative. If carefully managed and marketed, I think it might be possible to pull it off. She’ll have lost some readers, obviously, but possibly gained some new ones.

I’ve not read the book re the Iceland trip but as PP said I cannot believe they did it in winter. I’ve mountain biked some of it in summer and a very fit friend walked it in summer - it’s tough enough then. Also like PP said I thought all the huts would be closed in winter. Just not possible!

I found this gem of a 2 star review of TWS (and TSP) written in 2022 on Goodreads.

July 18, 2022
A Million Little Pieces………after reading both The Salt Path and The Wild Silence, I believe there’s so much that just doesn’t add up to the tales spun by the author. It’s as if a tragedy was fabricated as a marketing strategy for these books. Try googling Raynor or Moth Winn and you will find basically nothing about them other than that written in the books. 1. Homelessness? Hmmmm, she apparently had a mother who was still alive and owned a home at the time. 2. Other family? 2 ‘kids’ who we faintly learn are in college/college educated and on to careers in big cities. Practically ghosts through the family crisis and two books. 3. As if the walk was some epiphany? We learn in book 2 that they actually have a hiking history from their 20s. So why all the poor planning with gear? 4. Moth’s terminal illness? 9 years on and apparently not so terminal (good on him, truly!). 5. Lost home through bad investment? Homes don’t just get taken away overnight. The judgment and bad investment are never really explained. Normally homes are exempt from creditors? 6. Lifestyle choices or plain bad decision making? Limited funds spent on eating fudge and cream teas. Everyone indulges but if you are truly in extremis….. 7. Memoir or nature writing? I found the prose in writing of nature beautiful. And what do we really know about Ray other than her almost constant fearful state and her professed love of Moth. What do we really know about Moth, (other than he is terminally ill) for someone so central to her being. Moth seems to have no say in decision making or voice other than very petty dialogue throughout. The story just doesn’t add up but good on Ray Winn for ‘selling her story’. The first chapter of her first book left me with so much skepticism, I didn’t want to continue. But a friend had given me book #2 and said i must read book #1 (library loan). Just glad I didn’t contribute to any sales of either book. Oh, and love the cover artwork.

But if it's partially rewritten won't it be another "re-imagining" exercise, and thus completely fake because at the time of walking the C2C, the Observer article hadn't appeared and thus there was no Canossa-like pilgrimage being undertaken? A new walk somewhere (in 2025?), well that would be a completely different story!

Well, the register office being closed stuff and the hardware shop is also in TWS. Which obviously doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but is presumably check able— I would have said that, after the success of TSP, she’d be extra-careful about unnecessary untruths, but you never know, obviously.

But that’s happened a number of times before in her career, if we think (as I tend to) that the SWCP walk was essentially a cheap holiday rather than an act of desperation, with a retrofitted timeline about a diagnosis and a very partial self-exonerating explanation of losing their home. And if the Iceland walk didn’t happen as described or when. And what RW said in interviews to promote TWS about how they were going to walk 1000 miles in the spring is completely at odds with the narrative of the book, which explicitly depicts it as a series of on the spot decisions to keep walking from the original Cape Wrath trail.

If they (or just RW, as that seemed to be the walk of OWH) walked now, in 2025, it would have to be somewhere overseas where the books didn’t sell, otherwise they’d be recognised all the time, and not in a cute ‘I’m mistaking you for Simon Armitage’ way. Moth’s gait, weight, muscle tone and appearance would be being analysed, passersby would be taking photos etc. Quite apart from any potential hostility to them.

@BeardofHagrid I’ve been wondering about the nose peeling too, since reading your post. I know it’s a minor thing but it’s got me wondering. I know it’s very common to get a badly sunburnt nose and for other parts of the face to be less burned, but I feel like other areas of her face would’ve also been badly sunburned if she’d burned her nose several times to the point it had peeled, especially as she says she didn’t have any sunscreen.

Agree...too many people have now read the blurb for book 4 which specifically says Moth is resigned to " the inevitable" and RW cannot accept it hence goes off on big walk alone.

Does anyone find it odd that SW set off on her coast to coast walk while TW's health was in decline (hence why she goes alone according to On Winter Hill blurb)? We also know he probably had a heart condition diagnosed by this point as its mentioned in the Feb 2025 consultant letter so there could be some truth in the fact his health wasn't up for it. IG posts suggest she started the walk in Jan 2025. Just seems very odd she'd leave him to go and do that, given how close she portrays their love. No doubt the narrative is framed around her wanting space to think about TW's inevitable death but in real life it seems an incredibly strange decision to leave your ill husband unless you need material for a book.

FYI, I've copied the blurb from Penguin below.

After a turbulent year, Raynor Winn embarks on the Coast to Coast Walk in winter, unexpectedly alone. Despite 45 years of walking together, setbacks in her husband, Moth's, health have led him to see his decline as inevitable, which Raynor refuses to accept. Feeling trapped, she is drawn north, like a migratory bird, seeking the peace and hope that walking brings her. Navigating harsh weather and tangled emotions, Raynor reflects on the mountains they've climbed. Her journey becomes a meditation on our connection to the land and its power to help us remember, rebuild, and reclaim what is lost.

There is a big reveal in the book apparently! Extract below from the 'Muddy Stilettos' interview

And were you on your own for this? Did you camp, or stay inside?
No, I didn’t camp for this one, because it was winter, and some days I was in amazing snow in -10C. But I was on my own. Maybe not my best choice, but there’s a reason it had to be winter, which you’ll find out when you read the book!

Raynor Winn On Winter Hill | Muddy Stilettos Cornwall | Muddy Stilettos

A frivolous comment really, but Raysal's hair in more recent photos looks like it has had a very expensive makeover.

Maybe it's not a big reveal as such but purely for metaphorical purposes...the idea of walking out of winter into hope, from darkness to light etc etc. So it had to be winter. I wouldn't be surprised.

Maybe it was far more prosaic and it was the only time available as
a) she had a book deal with PRH which she had to complete before
b) the launch of The Salt Path film and follow up promo events!

Maybe. But less need to read the book to find that out.

Agree...too many people have now read the blurb for book 4 which specifically says Moth is resigned to " the inevitable" and RW cannot accept it hence goes off on big walk alone.

But really, even if everything hadn't come out, would not all the public appearances for the film in which Moth looks in frankly excellent health, after the walk the new book is about, have raised a few eyebrows?

I agree..it makes little sense! Can't people join the dots??

The Penguin website has excerpts of TWS which was published in 2020. Just a few pages but from reading these it’s clear the Walkers are still peddling the notion his death is imminent 7 years after they claim he was told he had two years to live in 2013. Just read these top parts of these screenshots.

i can’t understand how Penguin published three books and got ready for a 4th without questioning if they were really witnessing a medical miracle.

I have got it downloaded and I’ll read it when I have a gap. I didn’t pay for it because there was a queue in the Kindle shop and I was too hungry to wait 😊😏

You would have thought people would now have begun to join the dots, particularly when rereading passages such as the following one from TSP (p243) over 11 years ago now.

Living with a death sentence, having no idea when it will be enacted, is to straddle a void. Every word or gesture, every breath of wind or drop of rain matters to a painful degree. For now, we had moved outside of that. Moth was on death row, but he’d been granted the right to appeal. He knew CBD hadn't miraculously disappeared,but somehow,for a while,it was held at bay.While we had space to think clearly, when death wasn't hanging around the tent like a malevolent stalker, a thing to fear, Moth felt he had to say it.
"When it does come, the end,I want you to have me cremated".

TWS Iceland walk takes place at the end of summer- quite literally: they are told the buses stop after next Saturday because “winter starts on Sunday”.
I think this walk is just a week long and Timmoth is portrayed as getting through it by grit and obstinacy, at least the first half, before he’s able to power ahead of RaySal through streams and up and down volcanic scree slopes.

It's strange isn't it because if your husband had so little time left or was so poorly they needed care surely you'd stay with them?

It's strange isn't it because if your husband had so little time left or was so poorly they needed care surely you'd stay with them?

Let's face it, if the health parts were remotely true, Tim/Moth would be locked away in a secret medical laboratory undergoing full genetic mapping and every possible scientific test devised by pharmaceutical conglomerates scientists desperate to understand and isolate the specific and preferably highly profitable ingredients in his apparent miraculous ability to repeatedly reverse an imminently terminal prognosis.

Why the fuck have so many people's brains liquified and dribbled out of their ears aren't people more sceptical?

Yes, and framing it in the face of professional medical opinion, no cure etc etc.

I also hadn't realised the story of her writing TSP for Moth was in TWS. Makes all the more sense now why she said it in interviews - sticking to the script as per usual. I don't believe a word of it. She's created a dramatic fiction of her life using vague nuggets of more mundane truths.

Not to give them any undue lenience, but I think the passage you’ve quoted here is ambiguous enough to be fairly harmless. You could reasonably interpret it as a few poetic banalities about death - without wanting to sound too harsh - mixed in with Moth saying he wants to be cremated when he eventually dies and them maintaining he has CBD but he won’t die of it any time soon. I think this is all fairly consistent with what they’ve said about his CBD so far.