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.

Yes, there's a lot of Moth having trouble with something and her panicking, then him doing something more easily and them rejoicing. It did strike me that someone with more experience of long term or chronic health conditions would see these as part of the common ups and downs in health, capability and energy levels, with good days and bad days experienced.

I don’t think any of us will find it surprising that the Winn/Walkers’ behaviour is part of a wider pattern. This makes me so angry on behalf of the business owners.

@Catwith69lives and @Fandango52 of all the problems I had with the book when I read it this was the worst. There was a general sneeriness about 'locals' and their money making ways. While I don't know any of those featured in the book personally, there's a current epidemic down here in Cornwall of customers doing runners from cafes and restaurants without paying (nationwide too I suspect). And it must be hideous to be in the sort of business where people feel they can routinely fleece you. Then the Walkers added to this by putting the boot in with character assassinations.

I wonder whether Phoebe Smith's book Extreme Sleeps-Adventures of a Wild Camper was the inspiration for Raymoth's walk in 2013

• on p184 SW mentions having read the book
• the book was published on 1 April 2013
• the final court case ended in Feb and the farm was repossessed in June (not 7 days to leave!)
• The article by Phoebe Smith in the Guardian says that SW read her book just before she lost the family farm in 2013

‘The Salt Path gave us back our life’: walking back to happiness on Cornwall’s South West Coast Path | Cornwall holidays | The Guardian

Yes, this was one of the things that struck me most when I first read it, along with an equivalently ungenerous/ambivalent attitude towards people who actually helped them, like Jan and Polly. I (sort of) put it down to displaced anger and bitterness about being homeless, but it seemed very short-sighted from people who had, until a few weeks earlier, made a seasonal living themselves from holidaymakers.

Mind you, I’m not sure it’s limited to sneeriness about money-making ‘locals’ — one of the oddest bits of dialogue for me in TSP (and, as has been discussed more than once on here, dialogue is not her forte) is when SW, having discovered they failed to cancel their house insurance, which has been taken out of their bank account) asks the bank teller in the branch to refund them.

As if he were the insurance company. Or as if it were the bank’s problem that they’d forgotten to cancel their insurance.

As with some other bits of dialogue, especially with ‘authority figures’ saying something they don’t want to hear (whether it’s a consultant with bad news, a judge passing judgement against them, a shopkeeper saying they won’t refill their water bottles, a campsite manager telling them they have to pay for their stay, even if they arrived at midnight etc), it gets very aggressive and self-righteous. I dither between thinking ‘Maybe she does say these things, because she seems like quite a peculiar person with poor social skills’, or that she just wishes she had, or thinks these are normal, relatable things to say,

Thanks for the new thread and summary

exasperatedflatmate really good to hear of genuine fundraisers walking the path, thanks.

👏🏼

In April 2024, Tim walked the Thames Path. In January 2025, his health had apparently deteriorated from strolling along quite happily to the extent that Sally had to walk the Coast to Coast Path without him. If I were him, I'd not be walking it in January either.

I wonder what Instagram posts there have been deleted in between those times.

Anyway, if she was there this January just gone, and the book was originally going to be published in September (she says this on her Insta), that's an incredibly short lead time!

I feel so pleased that some of these people have been heard. I was always irritated by her slur of the guy on a bike in Treen campsite. And so pleased that we all got the benefit of Tadge's insight:

"But I'm not sure if she (Winn) has a conscience,this one".

the absolute disdain towards others screamed out when I read TSP. Maybe they always thought of themselves as ‘special’ and superior to everyone else. IMO there must be something deeply unhealthy about the dynamic between a couple which allows them to behave like this.

Part of the reason I joined this thread was to try to understand what attracted people to enjoy this book - to give it to others as gifts, to warmly recommend it. I still don't understand it.

Posters have said that people read it, who don't normally read - but do we know that?

I've seen many comments, in other discussions, where someone says that they were the only person in their book club who disliked the whole tone.

I can only suppose the mean-spirited attitude throughout was excused by the devastating back story. But, I always thought two wrongs don't make a right?

It is perplexing to me ....

Sep 7th is the date the article was captured. There's no name on the article, but I think it was written in the summer of 2004, as that was when a bbc journalist was seconded there.
http://rhiw.com/y_pentra/plas_rhiw/plas_rhiw_e.htm
However, we know there are inaccuracies in the article, as Sally does not come from Gwynedd.

Good piece of info!

Not sure if the Observer article has been uploaded

Hope is extinguished: CBS patients respond to Salt Path a...

Yes. The aspect of this that's annoyed me throughout is their avoidance of regular work - wanting to 'be free of the nine to five' as it's put in TSP (p208) and their disdain for working people or anyone running a profit-making business, yet their assumption that they should get all the benefits of the things they've opted out of.

RW in particular seems very opposed to working to improve their situation. Shame does periodically bemoan the difficulties of being a middle aged woman 'whose work history has been self employment' (p209) - glossing over the other difficulties with her employment record that we now know about - but I notice it's Polly who comes up with the sheep shearing fleece tying job: ' "Found you some work if you want it". Of course I wanted it' (p211) at which point I was thinking do you, really? Then in TWS, when she's worried about Moth forgetting where he's going when driving to classes:

'maybe I should start taking him to uni and picking him up later? No, it was a struggle for both of us to survive on his student loan; we certainly couldn't afford the petrol needed to make the journey twice a day' (p11)

This infuriated me because at this point RW is apparently doing nothing all day. She could've driven in with Moth, hung around at the college location then driven back. Or she could have got work - even part time or seasonal - to add to their income. Most oddly, her rationale in TSP was that she couldn't get a job because now Moth was terminally ill, she had to spend every precious moment with him. So why doesn't that now apply when she could travel to and from university with him?

At every turn it seems like finding work is dismissed as impossible for her because Reasons (until Polly boxes her in with the sheep shearing proposal) which are actually about work being for the other mundane drudges of this world but not her. Therefore all those drudges should be kind to her, fill her water bottles, turn a blind eye to theft and let her camp for free: she's special, don't they realise?

I'm honestly not a Norman Tebbit type (reference for the kids there 😉) but this has been a running annoyance for me. Landlines has just arrived (hooray!) so I imagine I have more of this to come.

Yes, all this time (it has been left as a note on the Wiki page - I've looked since the controversy broke).

All the quotes, reference, attributed to Tim are removed - but they didn't ever remove the note at the bottom!

1. www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/outdoors/features/rhiw.shtml" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">"The life of a garden". BBC Wales. 7 September 2004. Archived from the original on 7 September 2004. Retrieved 9 July 2025.

I'm honestly not a Norman Tebbit type (reference for the kids there 😉)

I thought I had a rough idea of who NT was, but went off to have a quick search to find out more about him and have gone down quite a big Google rabbit hole.

According to Google, his wife Margaret was born to a tenant farmer, but I found myself thinking: but was she really? Sorry to any Tebbit family members listening in - I hope you can understand my (light-hearted) scepticism.

In more cynical moments I view it as someone writing about the "experience" of having a spouse diagnosed with a terminal neuro condition without having done research into how the condition progresses, or the realities of living with it (for both patients and families). A sort of grief tourism, if you like.

It often comes across as floridly melodramatic, and very self-centred, but is undescriptive about what actually happens as the condition progresses. By contrast, everyone I know who's been in such a situation grits their teeth and gets on with the ups and downs, because they have to. There are plenty of emotions, and dread about how it might end - but you don't sit around bewailing how terrible you're going to feel when it does end. There's too much to deal with in the here and now - and why spend the limited time you have left with someone focusing on the awful way in which they're going to die?

I get very snarky, generally, about people who appropriate the grief of others to bolster an image of themselves though. And, it could also be a function of how badly SW writes at times.

Which wiki page?

Sorry, the garden in Wales:

Plas yn Rhiw

I’m one of the people who said that.

No, I have no statistical proof that people who don’t read much or at all read (or at least dipped into) TSP, but I think it’s pretty plain. It was the kind of ‘easy read’ book stacked near the till in bookshops, supermarkets, newsagents who stock a few books, and airport shops catering to ‘easy holiday reads’. (Habitual readers will bring books with them on holiday, not rely on slim airport offerings.) It appealed to walkers, people who holiday in, or live in Cornwall or along the SWCP, people who ‘like nature’, older people. It would have been the obvious book for people to put in their holiday lets in Cornwall, Devon etc. Apparently it was mentioned on Springwatch! I imagine you’d get a bit of crossover with people who bought things like the Yorkshire Shepherdess’s books because they’d pick up something whose author they’d seen on tv, or with a film still cover with well-known actors, because it feels more ‘accessible’. Also likely to mean it was given a lot as a present.

And a significant proportion of the Amazon reviews are visibly from people who are not habitual readers, either because they say so, or they say it was given to them, or because they think it’s ’well-written’ (!) or remark that it’s an ‘easy read’..

No working link or comment here?

I'm also confused, in this Wiki article it is reference No. 8, but that one works (the archived link cited first, the original is dead as well). There might be different Wiki articles.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plas_yn_Rhiw

I absolutely agree. When I read the TSP I thought they were a ghastly pair and so much of it felt riddled with untruths. I couldn't for the life of me understand the rave reviews it had received so I went on Amazon and read all the 1 and 2 star reviews which were absolutely in line with my own thoughts. There's a recent Amazon review on there from 4th August which just about sums up our whole 13 threads! We're certainly not alone !

Yet GA wanted film rights she was so blown away.