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.

Yes. I think it contributes to the 'humble, otherworldly Moth, too unsure of his own worth to believe he could have passed his degree' thing, which goes along with what SW is quoted as saying in the Melton Mowbray newspaper, about Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs showing up at their house: 'They told me to put the kettle on -- that's not what's supposed to happen to a girl from Melton Mowbray!'

https://www.meltontimes.co.uk/news/people/new-movie-based-on-melton-womans-moving-story-5161677

Sort of down home 'little old us and fame'.

(Also, the BSc reference in TWS is the only time I remember her referring to him as 'Mothman' (she says 'Mothman BSc'), which sounds cringe-inducingly like some hangover from a teenage nickname that's meant to sound all elusive and mysterious, but actually suggests a insect banging frantically into lightbulbs.)

This is a video of the Hampton Court 'Feel Good Garden' 2016. The Cornwall entry starts at about 04:12 and is credited to 'Booty, Dobinson, Shells and Walker.

Someone suggested in an earlier thread he probably did an access course during this year. This makes a lot of sense as he wouldn't have the entry credits. They wouldn't want anyone to know this of course because he's lied about previous qualifications.

Mothman is actually a creepy creature of urban myth in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman

In a way I see the whole TSP controversy as an elaborate game of chess between the reafing public and the media vs Raymoth, her agent and PRH.
Since her rebuttal, SW has continued to lose pieces on the chessboard yet she is still in the game.

Is there any denoument from the media that could act as a form of checkmate and force Raymoth, her agent and PRH to concede defeat and issue a definitive statement of facts and a full mea culpa?

In her rebuttal, she says "we use these nicknames alongside our legal names. The legal names we use on our bank records, our utility bills etc."

But, in one instance she did use the name Raynor Winn on the electoral register whilst at Hay Farm.

I'm now enjoying myself imagining a book with the tagline

SAINTLY, CRICKET-LOVING GARDENER BY DAY, RED-EYED SINISTER BIRDMAN BY NIGHT.

This page (presumably summer 2016) from the BBC has the pictured winning Cornwall students listed: 'Jenny, Lizz, Nicky and Tim are all passionate about gardening and are enrolled on a HND Garden and Landscape Design course with ‘Eden Project Learning’.
They may have switched to the BSc later on if it was clear that they wanted to continue and they were coping academically. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/57Khp4Hqkldy62bfggtqRL8/bbc-local-radio-and-rhs-design-a-garden-competition

But, in one instance she did use the name Raynor Winn on the electoral register whilst at Hay Farm.

Afternoon all. Perhaps because one of the easiest ways for a debt collector to trace you is through the electoral register? A Sally Ann and Timothy Ronald Walker at the same address would be of note?

None that I can think of.

Her agent's job is negotiating deals, contracts, foreign rights etc for her books. Though she may well have things to say about reputation management. I imagine PRH are just waiting and seeing what happens before deciding what's best to do about her contracted fourth book.

It clearly can't go out now as originally written, so either they quietly cancel it (and RW is no longer their problem except insofar as do they keep printing her three existing books, or let them go out of print?), or discuss with her and/or her agent whether she will write a final book which combines some form of atonement/explanation/account of what really happened, and a walk. Probably a solo one. And it would be much better for her reputation management if Tim were by then demonstrably much more unwell.

I haven't read TWS but this is another timeline that doesn't add up for me. How old was SW's mother when she died, does anyone know? I'm a couple of years oilder than SW and my mother was born in 1930. She was in her late twenties when my sister & I were born, about average for the time. She certainly wasn't old enough during the war to have a friend who was a Land Girl, and it was HER mother (b.1897) who was the Late Victorian. Sounds rather as though Our Sal has gone back a generation to add some family drama and conflict ... all very Catherine Cookson. Could be wrong, of course - just struck me as anachronistic.

Those three other students from 2016 have quite distinctive names. I would be surprised if the Observer was not able to trace them and ask them what they recall about their team member TimMoth. They must have worked quite closely on that project to get it entered in the competition.

Didn't PRH give her a four-book deal on the strength of signing up TSP, though? I'm sure I read that somewhere on here.

SW's mother was born in 3Q1924 and died in Jan 2015. Her gravestone says she was 90 when she died.

So not Late Victorian then. She must have been pushing 40 when SW was born - very unusual for the time. She might have problems conceiving, of course - I don't wish to come across as unkind here.

Not sure if this has been posted before.

www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jul/08/the-salt-path-is-a-box-office-hit-will-its-takings-as-well-as-its-oscar-hopes-now-fall-off-a-cliff

to concede defeat and issue a definitive statement of facts and a full mea culpa?

I don't think so. I think they would all just stay quiet. Raymoth would disappear and live in rural isolated comfort at home or abroad on the past earnings. The only thing I could possibly see happening, if undeniable proof appeared of something like the 2 year/2 months terminal diagnosis being faked*, is that the agent would drop her, the publishers would allow the 3 books to go out of print and not distribute the 4th one, with a statement being issued perhaps of having acted in good faith after been assured by the author that her writing was a true account.

At this stage however, I'm not so sure that she is still in the game. All the negative publicity about her embezzlement, all the doubts raised about the severity of Timmoth's diagnosis, about the real reason behind their (alleged) homelessness and setting off on the walk, even about the walk itself, the charity dropping them, the stories of ordinary people feeling harmed? Can she really come back from a solid month of that?

*Some might say there is already proof of that?

Have PM'd you.

😅perfect description!

There is only a single entry whilst at the farm for that name and no other entries for either of their names / pseudonyms in Cornwall. But that may just mean that the electoral registers are not available online or that they are not in the open register or possibly did not even register.

I’ve read that in a news article which came out when OWH was said to be postponed. I have checked the BBC and the Observer but can’t find it now.

Not unprecedented. Eric Arthur Blair never officially changed his name to "George Orwell", but became very publicly known by his pen name. So much so that when he married his second wife Sonia she took the surname "Orwell" rather than "Blair".

(And yuck, can't believe I'm comparing the Walkers with George Orwell!)

This is incredible for me to believe, but OWH is on the Waterstones website with a detailed synopsis. Incredulous. It’s not available to buy but you can order it!

www.waterstones.com/book/on-winter-hill/raynor-winn/2928377337544

If a debt collector with a legal claim was after them, would that person have a right to enquire about legal name changes and be informed of new names? After all, the right to change your name surely does not encompass the right to evade paying back debts?

I agree, their whole name situation is weird. Although Neil Galbraith sounds actually good!

But what really strikes me as weird now is why Sally chose a new name that is so tied up with her family (maiden name Winn plus family tradition Raynor) when she seems to resent them so much?

That speaks to a lot of ambivalence about her familiy situation that is also there in TSP - on the one hand her parents never told her they loved her, resented Moth, were establishment figures that tried to push her into a loveless marriage - but on the other she is 'a farmer's daughter and the land is in my bones'.

Why would she want to leave Moth in his inevitable, terminal, decline with serious health issues?

As anyone with an adored partner in similar circumstances unfortunately knows this is unusual even foolhardy given the conditions of the walk as described here?