Thread 11: 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
Thread One www.mumsnet.com/talk/amibeingunreasonable/5368194-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?
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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 - 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 ten 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.

No saltiness. Keep to the path.

Does stolen fudge taste better?

Definitely a doer-upper from what she says in TWS. She says that before they married they bought ‘a tiny cottage with a long garden on the outskirts of the village’ and there are references to them working on it, putting in running water and a bathroom, drying out damp, repairing the broken windows. So it sounds semi-derelict, maybe?They appear to have been planning to just move in together, but Raynor can’t face shocking her parents, so they elope to Skye.

I think the botany degree is likely to have been Tim’s CV-fluffing invention, or possibly an error on the other person’s part, like Sally being from Gwynedd.

Sally clearly thinks he’s an astonishingly wise, knowledgeable, multi-talented person. When he first raises the idea of teacher training, it’s coached as ‘ I can’t do physical work again, but I’ve got all these skills to pass on’.

I think the more interesting missing piece of the puzzle is the real reason for the sudden move to a remote corner of Wales. I don’t buy the whole “my child ran out into the street” therefore I must move NOW

Yes! It seems odd to make a sudden decision on this basis to move to an apparently random location, away from family and presumably the help with childcare they might be able to give. Which makes me think that the real point was either
a) to get away from family - could be either side, perhaps a falling out had happened or intensified
Or b) to get away from some other form of trouble that was about to hit.

Thanks @Debsthegardener for the botany info. I don't have your knowledge but I did suspect it was a case of 'who you know' and or a well spoken white man's word being taken on (National) trust 😁

Could it simply be that they had a dream of living on a smallholding near the mountains and sea and could move up the property ladder by buying a semi derelict property in N Wales for just under £40K in 1992 having quickly sold their property in Staffordshire?

TW's parents subsequently moved from Burton on Trent to Criccieth and we know that SW&TW were on good terms in the early noughties with the brother and his family who moved to France and stayed with the other brother in 2013.

I do think the price of land compared to where they grew up would have been a factor. Sal’s dad was a tenant farmer and had written confirmation that the tenancy would end and not be passed on; then her parents are furious that she doesn’t marry someone with his own land. So maybe it comes from that place.

I do wonder if she was always put down by her parents and desperately wanted to show them that she’d climbed higher than they ever thought she would? That sort of emotionally problematic childhood can leave deep scars on a person. If it turns out that Moth has expensive tastes, maybe even pushing that criminal behaviour.

But I also agree that the story we’ve seen of them moving to wales in about a month after their kid runs out onto the road- Tim giving up a job- is a bit surprising . They rented to start with in wales, didn’t they, so it wasn’t even a case of finding the dream project and moving quickly so as not to miss out. It was just moving quickly.

My list was only a few pages/days back. I'll add other ones that have cropped up but I don't think there are many. The botany degree seems to be the biggest relevant one.

They were able to identify a rare plant on the lizard:

"Our path was getting slower and slower. It could have been the hour we spent examining the rare Autumn Lady’s-tresses orchid, or the afternoon trying to photograph one butterfly, or the evening hanging over Kynance Cliffs watching seals in the cove below, but as it got dark we realized we’d probably only covered three miles, so put the tent up around the corner from where we’d taken it down."

I very much doubt it. The book is written for an audience in mind - PRH wouldn't publish otherwise. Indeed, its style is far from anything that would be a personal account just for Moth. I think the idea she wrote it for Moth is BS, even the first draft. It's just another part of the false narrative, like having not written anything since a child. It's part of the PR narrative, which she probably devised.

I have never created a username to add a comment before, absolutely impressed with all of your comments and the way that you are examining everything. My thoughts on the head gardener job, if Tim started as a volunteer he probably told them he had a degree, they wouldn't check for a volunteer, then when the job came up he would have had experience and been perceived as the ideal candidate.

You are probably right.

It does seem slightly strange that on the one hand SW describes Moth as being the most extraordinary person she has ever met, generating a rocket fuelled love that continues unabated through the decades while other couples' relationships descend into humdrum mediocrity.

Yet on the other hand we don't learn much about Moth in TSP other than the fact that he enjoys listening to Test Match cricket, reading Beowulf, eating Mars Bars and bears a curious resemblance to SA!

Yes, I was wondering how it was that, if her father had been dead for some time, and the farm tenancy presumably moved to a new tenant, her mother still seems to be living in the immediate vicinity, so that Sally can walk straight out of her mother’s garden onto their old farmland. But it sounds as they had farmed a farm on the Dunstall House estate (she says their farmhouse had been at one point the main estate house until the 18thc hall had been built, and was old and substantial, with a formal entrance and a drive lined with oaks), and her mother moved to a nearby cottage, possibly a tied one, after the farm tenancy ended.

She does also present her father being told the tenancy couldn’t be passed on as a key sadness in her own life, that she’d realised she would have to leave the farm, and stopped writing her own stories about animals (and imagining ‘holding my own book with a picture of a penguin on the spine’). But it’s not clear to me whether it would have been at all usual for a daughter to inherit a farm tenancy in the 70s, plus she had an older sister…?

She seems unable to write character at all. She does vivid little vitriolic pen portraits of passing walkers or disapproving people encountered on the path, or the diagnosing doctor, or the woman in the council office, but those come out of pure dislike/resentment. Whereas Moth might as well be a question mark with a rucksack and an illness, and a habit of telling long stories to captive audiences, and Dave and Julie, despite the fact that they appear for extended periods in all three books, never get beyond being “big, loud and northern’ (Dave) and ‘small, quiet and tough’ (Julie).

Isn't that area in some sort of nature reserve? I'd imagine there was at least a leaflet describing what you'd find there, if not a website.

I was thinking that - a rare orchid would probably be mentioned.

I also thought that the passage quoted upthread has a degree of snark in it again - other walkers are using this nature reserve to pass through quickly, meet targets etc, but they are slowing down looking at nature ...

Even those character traits are quite sparsely used. I'm still baffled by Moth carrying a radio, which would have added quite a bit to the weight of his pack (compared to the A5 notebook that was apparently too heavy to take later on!) and then only listening to it for the Ashes. They could either have had it for entertainment in the evenings, or sold / bartered it when money got really tight. Similarly, 'Moth's always been a big fan of baked beans' (p167 my copy, ch15) so it puzzles me that they don't eat them more on the walk - you might not want to carry tins for long but you could buy to eat them that day and they'd be more filling/nutritious than the ubiquitous noodles. Whoops, getting distracted by their packing oddities..

Back to my point: Moth's interests as listed above actually feature very little in the text. And in most cases don't really seem to exist (cough, resemblance to Simon Armitage, cough) other than Raynor asserting that they do. He really is a blank space. And it makes it hard to really feel where this charisma that Jason Isaacs talks about comes from. Maybe it's something conveyed in person, but it doesn't come across on the page.

Breaking Ha, Ha! I don't think Chloe need worry for her job but here goes:

Location : St Ives Conversation : with lobster pot man
He actually gives them an enormous tip about how to go in the back of a campsite.

They proceed to go up the main hill, through a long residential road and into the campsite, past the booking in office, and through all the other fields to the back.

They then would have had to go back through some of the fields to use the shower block. I have camped at the very back of the last field - legally! It has changed enormously and extended - but I camped there before them.

This is not earth-shattering but may shed light on the way this has been written?

Funny you should mention that!

A bit unlikely aged 20?

There is pretty much always snark in any description of others. Basically, they are always doing things the right way and everyone else is wrong. Even when people are (inexplicably) kind to them they are very light on the gratitude - eg the random person who gets them Minack theatre tickets after meeting them 30 seconds earlier. One of them does say 'Thank you so much, I'll pay you back' 😆 but there's no other enthusiasm on their part for the play, or appreciation of the generosity of a stranger.

From the natural Lizard website:

Sorry, because I know it, I haven't made the way at all clear.

He tells them to go up the coast path, and then turn left.

They go up the hill, turn right, through the residential road, and then straight on.

Attached is a clip of the Iolanthe production at the Minack in 2013 which they saw (apparently)!

I think you've hit the nail on the head with Ray having some sort of inferiority complex and possibly some of her own ingrained snobbery. Constantly reinventing Moth to be someone he's not. They would need the money they stole to look like they were doing well and able to do up the farm and buy a property in France. You can see how she really feels about people by the way she writes about them, especially the homeless. Nobody would recoil if you told them you had lost your house, certainly not in my world anyway.

When she was caught stealing she just reinvented themselves again, With moths illness ( exaggerated or not) and a sob story about a dodgy investment.

It would definitely be interesting to know a bit more about them before buying the farm, why did they really have to suddenly leave?

Sorry @TheBrandyPath still not getting the underlying bit of this (need more coffee..) is it that they deliberately went the 'wrong' way to get in without paying? And it's supposed to look like the guy told them to?

Hmmm, who knows? Discrepancy - yes.

He says that they look like they need a campsite, she reports what he says.
I know that gets you in the back of the campsite.

They go the public, residential way, and pass the main entrance with the office.
The silly way if you end up behind a gorse bush. That means they then have to also walk back to the shower block.