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.

Wasn't this the chapel in Polruan where they lived. If so, not too shabby!

If they were indeed using this place as a base for the walks in 2014 and 2015, it makes the schtick about being homeless, even more difficult to stomach!

Chapel Retreat | Chapel Retreat in Polruan, near Fowey

But in that case, what were they doing in 2014 when they supposedly completed the walk after Polly's? With the walking timeline now straying into at least August 2015 it's very hard to know when and what they walked after their known appearance at Land's End on 15th Sept 2013, or indeed their whereabouts.

I don't think that's it. At least according to RW's description of it as a 1 bed flat with only a narrow window. There's also a photo of RW at a small table inside it from a 2018 Guardian piece which doesn't look like it matches any of this. And when i looked it up previously there was no road that a Google streetview car could have passed by, but this looks like there is a road next to it.

When I was growing up we almost never ate out, because of the cost. But on the odd occasions we did stop at a café, my parents would order one pot of tea between then, and we'd have (normally) a can of coke between us three kids, and we'd have a Chelsea bun shared 5 ways.
It would never have occurred to my parents to just order hot water and use their own tea bag, even when they were counting out the money to pay (before we went in) searching in the corner of dm's bag for a hopeful 5p to have enough.

Article with an image inside the Polruan flat

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/dec/06/home-is-a-state-of-mind-you-dont-need-walls

Photo

I thought someone had suggested many threads ago there was either more than one chapel (though that seems unlikely somewhere so small?) or more than one flat in the chapel — I could be wrong. Certainly people have linked that before.

Unless it’s changed hands since the Walkers’ time? It seems wildly unlikely that the owner of an expensive holiday let in a tourist hotspot would rent longterm to people on a low income even out of season (and Cornwall doesn’t really have an off season these days in many places with retiree second home owners. St Ives and Falmouth always seemed busy to me off season. Don’t know about Polruan/Fowey.)

Incidentally, in the above linked Guardian article there's also what looks to be a PR photo of Moth, dressed in walking gear and both rucksacks at his feet. Not that this tells us much other than PR photos were taken to help market the book.

In case anyone is compiling a list of references to the walk being a cure, this article says: "walking all day, with a big pack, kept his physical and mental deterioration at arm’s length". SalTim might say that it isn't a direct quote attributed to them, but it's clearly a key takeaway by the journalist who went to their flat and discussed their story.

You could be right. Writing about the diagnosis runs the risk of rebuttal by SW - ‘he really is ill, ‘difficult to give a conclusive diagnosis,’ ‘I genuinely was devastated’, ‘it’s my truth,’ etc

And of course any sort potentially serious illness provokes an emotional response, so people are likely to feel sorry for them.

For that reason, I hope CH focuses further investigation on first and foremost the embezzlement, and on the untruths/ inconsistencies about the walk(s) and the books which have impacted negatively on other people- cafe owners, other walkers, people they may have stayed with.

SW’s ‘rebuttal’ on her website clearly tries to make suspicions about TW’s health the biggest ‘offence.’ The embezzlement is glossed over, with the implication that the business wasn’t being run efficiently. Clearly this is where SW feels on really uncomfortable ground. She might feel she can fudge the health issue by claiming she genuinely did feel it was catastrophic. Much harder to explain away embezzlement.

This is the Wesleyan Chapel (centre of image) in Polruan where they stayed.

...

Comment from somebody who walked the path in 2022 and read TSP:

I thought the book was good. As it goes I began my walk on sept 1st 2022 and had the book in my pack but only started reading in on the second day of my journey. I found it very inspiring…
So much so that I used it to collect all the passport stamps as I went through each section.
However, having walked the whole path (which took me seven months over two periods, one of three months and one of four months the following year)…I did become very dubious at some of the details.
A lot of the path is extremely hard on the body. Im a relatively fit bloke, and it took me weeks to get to the level where I could manage the tougher sections without too much stress (to note I was carrying a 22kg backpack)…
It takes a lot of food to get through the whole path, especially the tougher sections…I was eating three times the amount of food I normally eat…
Im very dubious that a couple could get by with only eating a fudge bar on some days, you’d collapse!?
I have no doubt that they’ve walked some of the parts in sections, but there did seem to be a lot of ‘skipping’ through sections, and if you add those skipping parts up it makes up a lot of the path itself….
In some parts of the book they would mention one day, then state that they went through here, here, here, on through here and found themselves at someplace, just days later…? Some of those skipping parts are a helluva lot of miles, would take two or three weeks to get through at a slow pace? And certainly not on a fudge bar and many, many stops in cafes for cups of tea…
A lot of it doesn’t make sense in reality
But I enjoyed it as a work of fiction.

The bedroom, according to TWS, has a stained glass window, and doesn’t appear to be fully furnished — they have a mattress and a ‘cardboard’ wardrobe (by which I assume she just means a packing box?) The kitchen has a ‘tall chapel window’ overlooking the neighbour’s garden, and loses the sun by mid-morning in winter. In fact, she makes the flat sound cramped and glum. It’s a ‘long, narrow, corridor-like space’, accessed via an iron gate and a ‘concrete-paved corridor between the building and the cliff face’. The ‘cliff face’ is also rat-infested.

She specifically says at the start of TWS that they’ve lived there a year, but says she’s barely spoken to anyone in Polruan in that whole time, which is kind of a useful alibi.

Especially as we now know to a degree of confidence that RW's claims of not trusting people due to the whole investment story are very flimsy. It seems the only perceived betrayal they faced was the one that the lending half-uncle chose to support the debt claimants for the court case by providing a truthful statement. Indeed, she is the untrustworthy one, but appears to project her flaws onto others.

What is interesting is that most, if not all of the photos that exist of Raymoth on the SWCP correspond to the section between Minehead and LE. Same clothes. Absolutely no photos of the section from LE to Poole apart from perhaps the 2016 IG post of the rucksacks and tent at Adelaide Chapel, Penlee Point.

For a while now my own theory has been that the three 'Raynor Winn' books are all a jigsaw of, for example:

• Sally and Tim Walker's real life experiences
• Imagination
• Exaggerations and embellishments
• Drama, victimhood and 'specialness'
• Fictional and non-fictional accounts read and seen elsewhere
• Earlier Gangani books (HNTDDD and the mooted Scottish one)

I think those real life experiences are not reported in the true a) timeline, nor b) degree of severity, nor c) personal responsibility. For example:

• Repossession of the Welsh house and barn (a & c)
• Diagnosis (a & b)
• Mother's death (a)
• Walks (a & b)
• Homelessness (a, b & c)
• Embezzlement (not reported at all, then b & c in RW/SW's statement)

I don't think that all the walking happened, nor when they claim it happened, nor in the large chunks they claim it happened, nor always in the directions they claimed it happened, nor for the reasons they claimed it happened, nor on the budget they claimed they had.

I think they wrote the books together, possibly with help from at least one other family member, rather than the sole author being SW.

Just my own theory based on the evidence so far, spidey senses and my own personal and professional experience of human nature. When somebody is willing and able to commit a breach of trust crime like a serious embezzlement, over an extended period of time and against people they know, that is rarely all they are capable of. There is usually a whole house of cards waiting to fall down. All it takes is one person to give one of those cards a bit of a nudge. That person, to their credit, in this case was CH's initial contact and CH, to her credit, has listened.

Finally, I would also like to say to anyone who is embarrassed for having been taken in by TSP and the Walker-Winn-Wyns, please don't be. It is not about being foolish, gullible, usually a non-reader or non-serious reader, not critical or questioning enough, as has sometimes been suggested on the threads. Believe me when I say that really doesn't describe me. If I could be taken in and drawn in, in a certain time and place, by TSP then anybody could. People who weave a tangled web, especially when aided, abetted and protected by others including trusted institutions and individuals, are good at what they do. That is why so many of them get away with it and for so long.

When somebody is willing and able to commit a breach of trust crime like a serious embezzlement, over an extended period of time and against people they know, that is rarely all they are capable of.

Tiotally agree @DisappointedReader .The embezzlement was not nicking £50 from the petty cash that you think you'll be able to repay because you're desperate, it is long term and considered entitlement that shows an utter lack of care for the people defrauded. I don't think someone of otherwise impeccable and responsible character would suddenly do it, for all sorts of reasons.

@DisappointedReaderi think that’s good assessment. Out of interest, is there anything specific which makes you think another family member other than SW and TW may have written the books? Or is that gut feeling?

Yes, that was going to be my question.

Yes! I began looking into this very thing last night. I aligned all photos I could find with location info with their walk timeline and they all landed in this Minehead to LE section. RW deleted a few but I know of at least one that purported to be "just after the halfway mark" with RW by the tent on a cliff. For reference, the halfway point is at Porthallow where Fat Apples is. I wonder of she thought that someone might work out the location and determine that "just after" is on the wrong side of where they were meant to be, thereby showing they were walking in the opposite direction? She's also wearing a light coloured top that I've not seen in other photos, but that's not evidence as such as she could have bought it en route from a charity shop. But ultimately, this abundance of photos up to LE suggests that section was their original walk where they stopped (possibly at the Minack, then to Bristol). They'd have known photos taken later on might not match the book or raise discrepancies, esp as TW wears different shorts on the 2nd (alleged) 2014 leg from Poole.

And again, they’re not being clever. SW could have been truthful about wherever they stopped on the first stint. Did it ever need to involve the entire SWCP? It’s not some kind of sponsored walk, or a Guiness Book of Tecords issue where they get disqualified. SW could have said it was not all walked in two stints as the book claims, but that’s she’d run them together in the book for the sake of coherence. No one would be losing their minds about that stuff if it wasn’t for the larger omissions and timeline massages.

Absolutely. Long term concealed deception requires careful calculation and planning. And from a position of trust. It says everything about her scruples.

She actually writes in TSP about missing bits (eg Portland) and how Timoth reassures her that it's not cheating.

Good work @AldoGordo . Though does it seem that they may have gone a bit further than Land's End, to the Minack? Because of the Ionlanthe story that ties it to 2013? Or does that seem suspect because of the lack of evidence that this actually happened and the likelihood that they could just have cribbed details off the Internet?