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

She's created a dramatic fiction of her life using vague nuggets of more mundane truths.

This is an excellent summary of what she’s done. So far, so James Frey-esque. He’s quite a good person to watch and learn from!

Ah, ok. I read a review that suggested the start of winter.

"...in this one they decide to battle against their demons and the elements by going to Iceland just as winter is beginning. They live in flimsy tents, walk by the help of thin poles and eat dried noodles for a fortnight."

There is a big reveal in the book apparently! (OWH)

Could it be that real Timmoth and film Timmoth have run walked off together, and that is the reason Raysal is walking alone? 🙃

I feel like there’s a heavy dose of cynicism and eye-rolling going on in the extract of the review you’ve posted here 😂 With the reference to flimsy tents and eating nothing but noodles, you’d think they’d learned nothing from TSP…. but presumably that’s both their modus operandi and the USP of the books, as PP have suggested on here.

Chloe H on X has commented a few days ago that the hotel where Ray ‘did the books’ went bust.

👀

Ok so they did the Iceland walk in September just before it closes down and winter starts. But they couldn’t or rather shouldn’t take a fortnight to do it as wild camping is not allowed and there are only about 6 campsites en route. So either they weren’t walking every day and rested in between legs or they broke the law in Iceland and camped where they shouldn’t. Or they made up that it took 2 weeks as the real walk (excluding the extension which is south of Porsmork and would only be an extra day I think) took my group three days.

Interesting! Of course, hotels do go under and it may have been nothing to do with RW. But it makes you question everything ….

i wonder if Chloe H has managed to track down former colleagues who may be able to shed more light

Out of allllll the crazy theories that have been bouncing off the walls in the last few weeks that one would probably come as the least shocking.

Wonder if they'd rather be known as JaMoth or Mothon.

Coincidence...? 🤔

And if you didn't do that why would you want the world to know you were such a terrible wife that you buggered off when your husband was so terminally unwell by writing it in a more than likely fictional book.

The Abersoch White House Hotel went bust in 2004. There are various internet posts which link to friends of the former owners. Did SW leave her role at the hotel due to it's closing down in 2004 ( if this was the hotel she was working in) and subsequently join the Hemmings as a p-t bookkeeper? Or did she leave before 2004 for whatever reason?

She apparently lost her job in 2001.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80p2pzgpmgo
“Martin Hemmings, who died in 2012, was an estate agent and property surveyor from north Wales, and husband to Ros Hemmings.

Mrs Hemmings, 74, became friends with Mr Winn when they worked at the same National Trust site in the 1990s.
"I got on extremely well with him," said Mrs Hemmings. "He seemed a really nice person."
Then in 2001, Mr Winn mentioned his wife had lost her job at a hotel as a bookkeeper.
"It coincided with my husband's bookkeeper retiring so I suggested her to my husband," said Mrs Hemmings.
"She came for an interview, and she was the one. She seemed very efficient, we liked her."
But she said after that her husband noticed a change in the business.
"Within a year or so we weren't making any money," said Mrs Hemmings.”

So her departure predated the Abersoch hotel going bust in 2004. There is no detail on how long she worked at the Abersoch hotel or why she left but at the beginning of the Wild Silence she describes herself as ‘an unqualified fifty something with no employment record’. Another lie.

I dunno. The entire review is kind of odd. Talks about a bit where someone uses oregano to put in their camp food as being moving and funny.

barbarakorzeniowska.com/2022/02/20/the-wild-silence/

Just read the whole review now and agree it’s strange! As you say, the oregano reference is odd - it’s the first time I’ve heard the act of adding oregano to food described as ‘moving’ 😂

I enjoyed TSP, though I assumed that artistic licence had been taken to an extent, and also that Timmoth's diagnosis may not have been quite as it seemed.

I was curious to know "Moth"'s real name so tried to find out, using my knowledge of tracing people (I do a lot of family history for other people as well as myself) but when I couldn't find any trace, I assumed that they were using nom-de-plumes. No problem.

I then read the Wild Silence and really disliked it. It felt contrived, and SW sounded angry throughout, blaming everyone and everything but herself and TW for anything that went wrong. I decided not to read anything more of hers because of this.

We know now that blaming the world is indeed the modus operandi!

Well, they’re there for the final week of Icelandic
’summer’, after which time the buses stop running out to the finishing point of the walk, and the huts they camp near on the trail close down. So there’s this weird, artificial built-in jeopardy — will Moth get to the end in time for the last bus? Which made very little sense to me when I read it, as there seemed no reason they couldn’t have started a week earlier or a month earlier? And clearly they now had the money to stay in a hotel before starting the walk, and to call a taxi if needed to get them.

I mean, they’re supposed to have been rewilding the cider farm since they signed the tenancy the precious October, but hey, they’re wild free spirits, they can go to I eland on a whim. They’re also supposedly coming home to manage their first apple harvest, but instead they wait until a storm strips most of the trees bare and they wander around the orchard saying all the apples will go to waste, until a volunteer crowd shows up to help, apparently to their surprise, despite what a local poster on here said, that everyone helps out annually on ‘Apple Day’.

Also, it’s an incredibly dull walk. There’s a limit to how much Raynor can emote about connecting to nature when you’re just walking through volcanic rock in a foreign country, where don’t know the folklore and aren’t starving, so there’s lots of stuff about a girl in red trousers and her relationships.

I mean, it’s a pretty strained book, full of unrelated stuff. There’s her going mad in the flat in Polruan as Moth deteriorates and drives off in the wrong direction to his studies, her mothers death giving her a chance to reminisce about childhood on the farm and how she met Moth, then the offer of the cider farm and ‘Sam’ literally weeping with joy at how much they’ve achieved. And the Iceland walk.

I tend to think that if you are still spinning significant untruths about your life by the time you're in your sixties then you probably always will be..it's something that's just embedded in the psyche by that point imo. And yet being honest is so liberating.

Well, which is why I wouldn’t necessarily think we’ve had the last book from Raynor Winn. ‘As I leant into the teeth of the gale, far from the only man I’d ever loved, who was facing his final decline, walking alone for the first time in my life, I thought about all the mistakes we’d made. I’d made. The bitter wind searched me, and I fell to my knees on the stone flags of the path, the moors stretching to either side, keening in my ears. It would not let me be. I would tell the truth, whatever the cost.’ Yadda yadda.

"I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody, than a real nobody"

Thanks for the summary!

And to top it off, the Iceland trip may have taken place 1.5 years prior in Feb, before any cider farm, adding further strain to create a narrative. One would think RW would mention a previous and recent trip to Iceland in the book if writing about going there. Do you know if she writes anything about it being icy or snowy there?

Also, another review on goodreads said they were disappointed at how little detail there was about the rewilding claims - just "a brief mention of the animals and hiding out in a tree looking for moth grubs!"

It seems incredible it was published! But from a business sense, I guess anything by RW would have sold after the success of TSP.

Mass market reach is far more important to many publishers than literary accomplishment. Look at 50 Shades of Grey.

TSP was a phenomenon and ever since, pretty much every interview with SW has verged on the hagiographical.

I haven't read WS (because having done the 55km trek some years ago, couldn't see why you'd want to write a book about it) while LL wasn't a patch on some of the epic accounts of walking from Land's End to John O'Groat's (or vice versa) like John Hillaby's Journey through Britain.

I'm sure there will be some die-hard SW fans who will read anything she writes, such is her legendary status, but I don't plan to be one of them!

She specifically says that ‘winter’ starts on the first Sunday in September, and that they set out five days before this. People at the huts en route keep telling them they’re about to close up for winter. And they definitely cross ice fields, and when SW tries to get out of the tent to pee at night, the zip has frozen shut, but there’s no snow.

I think she mentions a snowfall overnight on the last Saturday, because they remark that winter came 12 hours early or something.