Thread 12: 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 - 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 eleven 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.
Will our life-size cardboard cut-out Simon Armitage keep his head?
NB Timeline coming in the first posts of this thread for reference.

I've walked 145 miles of the path over the last few years in stages (got to find the time to finish!) and can categorically say that the average age of walkers is over 50.

Seeing a young person is much more remarkable.

Oh and I haven't met single person walking the trail who was anything other than lovely.

Well, it does what it says on the tin...

"But will he - can he?" reminds me of the historical romance fiction I read as a teenager, that I already knew was bad even back then.

There's even the gloomy fate of the 'island nation' getting tied in with their walk ffs 🙄

I get the impression she is a very conventional person who'd love to be, or be seen as, a creative free spirit. And when faced with an authentic free spirit (Tadge) feels angry at her own lack of same.

I'm not massively familiar with the books - just a skimmed online version of TSP - but isn't that paragraph pretty much a re-run of the Izzy W-T, clinging-to-an-outside-toilet scenario that was quoted many threads ago? She seems to have a very narrow range.

I’ve actually met some surprisingly sour members of the Ramblers Association when walking, but this was mostly when I was a student and walking around Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, the Cotswolds etc, and as I was young, female, solo, I offensive-looking, not littering, letting gates open or wild-camping, and was just nodding and saying hello as I passed, I don’t think it was anything to do with me. Some people are just sour.

I did wonder at the mindset of someone literally turning their head away as they passed me on a path where we’d seen one another approaching for a long way, and where I’d passed no one else for hours, but people can be odd.

Yep, I know three couples who’ve done stretches of between a couple of days and a week to 10 days. All retired in their sixties.

Business Insider says 'it's believed' she got an advance of around £10k. Seems about right for a book like this.

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-salt-path-controversy-explained-raynor-winn-responds-2025-7

Oh yes I've experienced that too, especially when walking with a dog on other trails.

But I haven't experienced it on the SWCP, perhaps I've been lucky. It may also be because I've tended to avoid summer season when the SW is very busy with tourists. On the winter days that I've walked we've not seen many people at all, other than perhaps at the start of the day getting a bus from one part of the walk to another. When we have come across people on the path, especially those carrying packs they've been nice and generally chatty and interested in sharing stories about their walk.

Last year we did a couple of summer days and met some young women from the US who were doing the trail in 6 weeks, they seemed a lot less fit than some of the older walkers!

Yes, that sounds plausible, @notwavingbutdrowning1.

But I think their figures on how much she earned from sales are too high.

The blurb reminds me of one of those not-very-good children’s fantasy books that sold like hot cakes in the wake of Harry Potter mania. I think it’s all the references to magic and the rhetorical questions. I’ve bought the book to read, but reading this blurb isn’t a good sign of things to come 😂

Makes sense, in your twenties it's not really cool.

In your thirties / forties likely to have work/ kid commitments.

We're probably going to try to do two week stretches next year. We both still work.

Just anxious that we won't ever finish if we don't crack on!

I haven’t experienced it on the SWCP, either, but I’ve only walked individual bits as day walks. .

I agree it seems high. The Bookseller also repeats the Bookscan figures though. I can only think it's because of the overseas editions.

It makes sense that most people walking the SWCP - or doing any sort of long-distance walk in the U.K. or abroad - will be retired, so middle-aged and older, as most people of working age won’t be able to get enough time off or have the funds to commit to a long walk. For example, I’d like to do the Camino de Santiago, but I wouldn’t be able to get the time off to do the whole thing now.

ETA: and if you’re retirement age and have kids, they have usually left home by that point, so you don’t have to think about how they’ll be looked after when you’re out on the walk.

I do a lot of daywalks, mostly in the peaks and pennines.

I think many hillwalkers (including me!) are quite solitary types and happy to be alone, but almost everyone smiles and says hello as they pass.

I've also walked in mountains all over the world, though almost always with organised groups, and can confirm that people under 50 are quite rare. And even though we may be in a group, a lot of group members are clearly introverts and happy to read a book rather than party in the hotel bar at the end of a long day

You wouldn’t buy it for its style, but clearly a lot of people found the way she writes (combination of ‘mustn’t grumble’, obsession with tea, spousal concern, plucky underdogs pitched against a big, hostile world, plus some rather overwritten attunement to nature stuff) relatable.

Actually, there are things about the irritated way she describes other people met on the path that remind me strongly of a lot of Mn AIBUs —

AIBU to think this campsite employee was rude and a jobsworth for expecting us to have paid when we arrived?

AIBU to think this dog owner should have apologised for his dog running into our tent?

AIBU to think this shop should have refilled our water bottles?

AIBU to think the visitor centre employee was being a jobsworth for not serving us food even though she’d closed up?

etc etc.

Her book was already announced in her piece in the Big Issue published in July 2017, so the contract must have been finalised quite a while before then. Which makes it look like that piece was part of the advertisement campaign by PRH.
@FurryHappyKittens could you add the Big Issue piece to the timeline - and didn't someone have a link to the email she wrote to them pitching it?
@AldoGordo iirc correctly you do the Inconsistencies - she writes here that "We camped and sofa-surfed for a while" before setting off, which is a different narrative than the 'we spend 2 weeks in Moth's brother's house' in TSP

https://www.bigissue.com/news/housing/rural-england-homeless-problem-hidden/

I think there may have been a draft of it written in 2014/15 while Moth was studying and she was at a loose end but then the events of 2015 - her mum dying and Moth being given some sort of medical diagnosis were added to the previous draft to create a bigger emotional hook.

Penguin then made her take out the reference to her mother’s death - too easy to prove it didn’t happen in 2013 (if you know her real name). But what did Penguin know or check about the diagnosis? Were they happy to rely on Sally’s representations and Moth’s right to patient confidentiality or did they knowingly say ‘yes but if we are publishing under a pen name no one will ever know if this has been exaggerated a bit?’

And what did Sally say about the pen name? “I’ve always fancied one”? Or “I want to protect Tim’s right to privacy re his health” or “I don’t want my thieving past to catch up with me so need to hide my identity”?

Perhaps the original manuscript and the real names which started the investigation got to Chloe from someone at Penguin with a conscience?

10k advance sounds about right. Agent will usually take 15 percent of royalties assuming most sales in UK

Arguably, if she’d written the book honestly she’d not have 3-4 million in bank right now. I think the powers-that-be in this context thought a tiny bit of exaggeration (as they saw it) fine.

They likely had no idea about the criminal back drop.

She seems to have a very narrow range.

She'd have you know that in fact she had a very fine powder blue range. possibly paid for by the Hemmings

But his real name isn’t Ray, is it? Birth and marriage records are Timothy. Raynor is a family name on Sally’s side (did I read that it’s her mother’s maiden name?).

Obviously I’ve misunderstood something, apologies.

Not sure if the link to the second Observer story has been shared or not. If so, apologies

The Salt Path: what did the publisher actually know?

😂😂😂