Thread 13: 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's original exposé: The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

The 12 Observer reports currently available online: The real Salt Path | The Observer

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?^

Threads 2-11: Links all in the OP of Thread 12

Thread 12: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5384574-thread-12-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse welcome. It would be helpful to read at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently 12 interesting items on The Observer website and linked to above.

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 twelve 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 our usual reasonable and respectful fashion is very welcome.

Have the sales or thefts of fudge gone up recently?
Will Simon's head ever turn up?
Has the shed of doubt yet burst at the seams?
Will the old charabanc hold up as a tour bus for our hip new band The Drive-By Scolders?
And finally, how much salt can we possibly cram into a giant pinch?

Keep to the path. No saltiness. May the fudge be with you.

Quote from the article:
Ich teile den Tisch mit meinem Ehemann Moth, der ihn für seine Arbeit als Landschaftsgestalter benutzt oder wenn er Pläne für die kommende Apfelernte macht.

So she makes a claim here that Tim is actually working as a landscape designer - is there any proof of this?
He does not seem to have any online professional presence on Linkedin or anywhere else, and by 2022 they are already millionaires anyway.
Sounds like yet more BS to me, but no one seems to have questioned it at the time.

Photo of the date being changed daily on the Land's End sign!

By the way, in TWS she claims he was studying 'sustainable horticulture', not horticulture/landscape design

They had a library?…in that tiny house? Fancy

They were staying with the brother for 2 weeks after they left Pwilheli. The brother lived in Stoke on Trent.

Sorry, should have enlarged the picture before commenting, the top part with the year was cropped in my preview 🤦🏻‍♀️
But I actually don't doubt they did some sort of extended hike in 2013 after losing their house, to get away from it all while planning how to go on.

Apologies, I appear to have mis-read or got two reports muddled up. But to return to TSP, the disclaimer re. changing some names/places to protect privacy appears to have been used in more than just a few cases. So much so that, as I have already remarked, probably 70% of TSP was the product of RW's imagination. Cleverly woven into the actual locations along the SWCP. My personal grievance remains - that I was presented with TSP by a friend who thought her gift was a true story - one which I would be interested in reading as I was born and raised in Minehead. We were both deceived.

I think she calls back and says the bus turned up. Then later we hear about the job as you describe.

I found this photo a while ago but never noticed the date - great spot! The timeline I constructed based on the few dates and day numbers in the book, as well as the supposed "one Thursday in August" start, puts there Land's End day on 19th Sept. So not a huge discrepancy there.

Stoke on Trent to Land's End via Glastonbury is 345 miles & would take 6 hours 15 minutes to drive according to Google Maps. Britain isn't that big even a journey like Land's End to Edinburgh can easily be driven in a day.

It is taken from SW's IG feed but has now been deleted. I wonder why, as it seems to prove that she and Moth did reach Land's End on 15 Sept 2013.

I have them at St Ives around 11th Sept ( St Ives Festival from 14-28 Sept started on the Saturday), The Tinner's Arms at Zennor on the 12th Sept, Portheras Cove on 13th Sept, one further night wild camping on 14th Sept and then Land's End on 15th Sept. Minack/Treen is I think 18th Sept and Lamorna Cove (Full Moon) is on the 19th Sept (according to the margin comments in the PD SWCP guide). So the dates seem to fit with the sign at Land's End.

To be fair, it proves they were AT Land's End on that date. It doesn't mean they'd walked all the way.

Library does sound a bit...overblown. I call ours " spare room stuffed to gunnels with DH's many books". Maybe I am underselling!

Interesting. I wonder if they managed to get the post in their own selfie or whether they were forced to pay. (Or maybe it is only more recently the charge has been made)

It's a selfie so they wouldn't have paid. I think the official photographer often leaves early if the weather is poor (as it seems to have been on 15th Sept) and there is nobody around who wants their photo taken.

Yep, what she deletes and what she leaves in does not correspond to what we here consider to be evidence for/against her at all, so she's probably not lurking here to read!

But also, this is the woman who thought it was a good idea to put those 3 doctor's letters into the public, which have actually confirmed a lot of suspicions, so what she considers a smart move might not make a lot sense to us.

Def, def underselling :)

'Iolanthe' was being performed at the Minack by the Cambridge University Gilbert and Sullivan Society that year. Would they have been heading to the Logan Rock pub or the Cable Station Inn? Does the book say which?

"They steal overnight accommodation and food from honest people trying to make a living, and the reader is supposed to applaud? It is incomprehensible that the husband was funded as a student, the book ending with them planning to live off his student ‘loan’.
I cannot understand why this book has been so successful and why it has been made into a film. What has happened to morality!" Amazon review pre observer. Morality matters.

There's always been a charge I think - the photo service at Lands End was delivered by an external company till recently - Courtwood Photographic.

That also fits with Iolanthe at the Minack which was being performed that year between Mon 16th – Sat 21st September

Doesn't say. I assumed it was the Logan Rock but I'm not so familiar with the area. It should be possible to verify with some of the cast members whether they remember taking Raymoth towards Treen campsite in their van.

Not if you’re Raymoth ;)

I can’t understand Penguin at all. Why aren’t they suing her?
There have been questions on these threads asking out of curiosity and pure bafflement why RW and her three books were so successful in the first place. One of those reasons is surely the long standing credibility of Penguin. It really hit home to me yesterday when I was browsing in my local independent bookshop. There’s a wall decorated with the covers of hundreds of classic Penguins over the years. Hers wasn’t physically amongst them, I might add… but before the truth came out, she/her trash books was/were a part of that credibility, authenticity and revered brand image. I bought the books, not because they were by the cash register in a supermarket or served up to me in the blockbuster section of an railway station newsagent but because there’d been endless plugging in glossy magazines, bookshops, of how wonderful and extreme and real it all was. Stickers on the covers announcing the prize winning credentials etc. As a fifty-something woman myself, RW was a bit of a heroine figure, a proper warrior taking charge of an extreme situation and fighting back at the “nasty” people who made them homeless whilst simultaneously throwing her terminally ill husband out of any kind of comfort zone due to lack of choice.
Ha. You find out that RW is a fictionalised version of SW. It hurts to read statements issued by her lawyers like “The Salt Path is an honest account of what we lived through on the path and I stand by it.”
Penguin should be dropping her not enabling her.