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 was a Vango mirage.

The tent model they used was available in 2013. Vango Mirage as a PP found. It's identical. However, it seems Raymoth have since bought a new version (or new poles) following their SWCP trip because older photos show very clearly green poles but later photos on the LL walk show grey or dark green poles.

Thinking about this now, what I find strange is - why was he taking notes? Why wasn’t she taking notes, if she was the one who wrote the book and also if she apparently wrote it for him?

Also, based on the experience of living with CBD as given in the Observer’s podcast today, isn’t it possible Moth’s hands would’ve been pretty affected by the CBD?

And if so, how would his notes have been legible enough for RW to read - especially if she’s reading them after the walk was over? I can barely read my own handwriting even a couple of hours afterwards 😂

Also, presumably others have thought of this, but is it worth one of us emailing Chloe H a list of our suspicions/inconsistencies that we’ve considered? No doubt she’s considered these already, but I’m curious.

Could anyone with access or memory of Landlines please let me know if Raymoth climbed Suilven or merely skirted it? Also, I'd like to know what is said, if anything, about Moth's health or physical ability at this stage of their trip. I'm looking into something...

I've been sitting on the fringes and have read all the threads. I've also just finished the first book and listened to this podcast.

It would seem they made up Moths diagnosis of CBD and then later tried to convince doctors that he had it to hide the lies. I can see Ray being like a dog with a bone.

The book just didn't add up. They were extremely unprepared and made some really stupid decisions concerning where to camp and what to eat. Desperately trying to identify with the homeless and exaggerating about people recoiling when they found out ( doesn't happen) I really think this is how she sees the homeless so expected this to be the reaction, which just shows how they lied about the whole trip. I also think she's not a people person so she struggled to make up interactions. Some of it is quite mundane and then the descriptions of the scenery become very descriptive and almost poetic ( Moth ? ), like two different people are writing.

It's very difficult to know what to believe.

The tent used in TSP was apparently bought second-hand from eBay, so maybe it showed signs of wear and tear after the TSP walk, so they decided to replace it. Presumably they replaced it once they had funds coming in from the TSP advance or sales - maybe they replaced it when they bought new walking gear for TWS? I haven’t read TWS, but I think people mentioned here that RW mentions they’ve bought new gear in TWS for the Iceland walk.

What was the theory about borrowing the degree, again? I vaguely remember this coming up on previous threads. It still seems plausible that Moth could have the qualifications/experience needed to be head gardener. Is the main argument for the degree-borrowing theory that he has previous form for fraud and that a botanist and academic shares his name?

Makes sense. The tent looks newer in more recent photos. I don't think the tent is a source of inconsistency. She even got the weight of it right - some truth!

They don’t climb it. They say they’d seen it once from a distance when they’d been hitching in their 20s, and wanted to go back to see it closer, but never had. It comes up because whoever is collecting their van says they’d can only collect it from nearby Lochinver.

In Ch 8, they’re ’in The foothills of Assynt’ and see it and remark on Suilven recently being made famous by a film about an old lady who ‘defies the call of the care home’ to climb it. Then they keep passing groups of local young people heading up Suilven in the late afternoon, who say they’re only heading up for the night because there’s not much else to do in Lochinver on a Wednesday night. They’re camped across Loch na Gainimh watching the party lights on the summit.

I don’t know the area at all, but there seemed a bit of a disconnect between her forbidding description of Suilven as steep and difficult, and the fact that the entire teenage population of Lochinver is heading up there for a party.

An archived BBC interview refers to his degree. He then did one, for the first time, at Plymouth/Eden.

As I recall, Gibson failed to donate money she'd specifically raised for charities. Along with scepticism about her fantastic claims, this led writers to investigate.

Also, if the idea was to become a teacher after the walk and he already had a Botany degree then he could have pursued a one year PGCE without requiring a 3 year Horticulture degree...but that would be less loan money...

There was an article posted which was about the NT property where he worked. It said he had a degree in botany. Then I think a PP discovered there was an actual botanist with the name Tim Walker. There is no proof that the two things are connected, I don't think.

I remember a BBC article linked to on a previous thread that showed a photo of him with other first-year students on his course. I can’t find the article atm, but I think the timeline checked out with the timeline given in TSP of him studying for a degree. I don’t think the article lends any weight to the ‘degree borrowing’ thing - unless I’ve misunderstood, which is definitely possible!

In one of the books she says the poles got broken and were held together with tape.

Many thanks for the info. Sadly doesn't help much. I wanted to know because there's a video on RW IG account in which she is at a loch beneath Suilven and breathily plugs the paperback of TWS coming out. What I found intersting was TW walks across the shot in the background and looks perfectly stable. So I was curious to know if there could be another inconsistency here if the book mentioned anything at odds to do with his abilities.

Ps..I'm amazed it takes until Ch 8 that they are only in Assynt. There must be a lot of preamble before they start their walk..?

She says they bought exactly the same model of Vango for Iceland because the tentpoles of the old one had broken. And they use the same rucksacks from TSP, even though hers has split at the seams and needed to be patched just before they went to the airport, because it’s crammed with new gear they hadn’t needed on the SWCP. And they bring the same noodles, with added nuts.

A bit of me thinks this is a cynical attempt to make the Iceland trip just sound like an extension of TSP, when in fact it’s just a holiday, probably quite an expensive one, involving flights and hotels. And that moaning about the ‘excessive cost’ of buying food in Iceland, or pre-packed hiking meals, and the fact that they can afford to check in to the airport hotel, rather than pitch their tent under the flight path, likewise.

(I mean, there’s nothing wrong with spending money on a holiday, obviously, but don’t then pretend it’s a cheapie medicinal expedition, born out of the necessity to get Moth walking again.)

I hope we never find out. Imagine what the wondering is doing to the Walkers. Who do they know who would do that to them? Was it a friend? A relative? Someone they see regularly?

They deserve never to find out.

These are notes I made before I joined this thread:

This from Daily Mail comments: I knew Tim back in the early 2000s when he worked in Plas yn Rhiw, not far from Aberdaron on the Llyn Peninsula, as head gardener. Also recall him talking about doing plastering work on a property in France at the time.

This led me to more about them then - this from 2004:
Tim came to the garden ten years ago. He was living in Staffordshire with his wife Sally and their two young children -- and working for the family business as a master plasterer, but had a degree in botany. Law clerk Sally was originally from Gwynedd. It was when - one day managed to get out of the house and down the road on his own that they decided they wanted to live somewhere safer for children. Within three weeks Tim had resigned from work, their house quickly sold, and they moved to a rented house near Criccieth to begin their new life, before finding Pen y Maes near Rhoslan, the dilapidated house they were looking for, so that they could "restore a bit of rural Wales". It was, says Tim, "a life-changing experience to restore a house as a key piece of history."

Others have then posted, the much later, article of Moth with his fellow students on the horticulture course.

Thanks! I’ve found a reference here - https://wikishire.co.uk/wiki/Plas_yn_Rhiw#cite_note-Plas-3 - to TW working as head gardener at Plas yn Rhiw. I think this is the reference used in previous threads.

I can’t see a reference in the link to TW having a botany degree though. Maybe it mentions the botany degree in the full article mentioned on the link, but that’s been removed - https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/outdoors/placestogo/gardens/plasynrhiw.shtml - has been removed. Not sure if anyone on here could access it previously and it’s just been removed recently, or if it was removed a while back?

Also, given TW’s age, perhaps he did his botany degree - if he did one - before student loans came in. If that’s the case, maybe he would qualify for a loan? I’m not sure what the rules are for people who graduated before student loans came in and who want to do another degree.

They don’t actually leave the cider farm till Ch5, and they stop off in Lancashire to stay with Dave and Julie, who are shocked at Moth’s deterioration in the two years since they’ve seen him, then stop again to have some doubts about their boots in Fort William, and then discover from a homeless man living in his car in a layby that Cape Wrath is closed till June because of military manoeuvres. Raynor says she’d known it was military land but that it hadn’t crossed her mind to ‘see if they were firing’ (?), get thrown out of a cafe in Kinlochbervie because they’re ‘incomers’, then drive to Sheigra and eventually decide to start from there instead. So they don’t actually start walking till Ch 7. There’s a lot of faff about where the van will get collected from.

The whole thing about the degree is that in the National Trust interview he says he has a degree in botany.

A forumer discovered that a man of a similar age called Tim Walker has a degree in botany.

'Our' Tim Walker got a full student loan to study for a degree in 2014/2015, including a maintenance element.

Another forumer pointed out that he wouldn't have got a full student loan if he already had an undergraduate degree. Maintenance loans are for first degrees only.

So either he was lying about having a degree when he worked for the NT (and this now may be borne out by what Ros Hemmings has said about his demeanour at the time), or he's lied about not having a degree in order to get a full student loan.

It is a bit of creative thinking to imagine he borrowed the botany degree, but if another Tim Walker had one, knowing what we know about them, then it's quite feasible he saw this other man's name somewhere and took the degree for himself in order to get the National Trust job. His thinking being if anyone looked into it they'd find a Tim Walker with a botany degree. This was pre Internet.

I'd be surprised if Moth qualified for a student loan for a horticulture degree if he already had one in botany. Post-graduate degree yes, but not another Bachelor.

Thanks! Just wondering if you got the head gardener/botany degree info from this now-deleted link (https://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/outdoors/placestogo/gardens/plasynrhiw.shtml)? Sorry, cross-posted with you just now when I mentioned the link!