Thread 16: 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 14 Observer items currently available on their online 'The real Salt Path' page: The real Salt Path | The Observer

More from The Observer:
‘Hope is extinguished’: CBD patients respond to Salt Path...
The real Salt Path | The Observer (The Slow Newscast)
I will link to two more Observer videos in the first post of this thread.

The Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube

Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement: Raynor Winn

Thread One ^www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/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: 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?

Thread 13: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5386458-thread-13-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 14: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5388981-thread-14-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 get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting. There are currently a number of 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. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea. 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 fifteen 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.

Yes, it really is Thread 16.

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

Going by the timeline, wasn’t the eldest child at uni by then? And the younger 6th form age, so may have been at college rather than school. Secondary school would probably be outside the village anyway. I think the stage of life the family were at would have made it easier to avoid gossip. If SW had been at the village school gates every day and doing play dates it would have been harder

Absolutely @Freshsocks & @Uricon2. Or shop in Criccieth or Caernarfon instead of Pwllheli. It's about 30 mins drive to one of the other 'big' towns from where they were but in completely the other direction, so highly unlikely they'd meet a Pwllheli local in Tesco Caernarfon, for example.

@WhoDaresWinns Polruan is the other end of 2 countries from Pwllheli so v v unlikely that anyone in Cornwall would know of dodginess in NW Wales. It's the ideal reinvention IMO.

Why did the garage man do the work on their car if he had heard the gossip about the embezzlement? I would have thought he would have wanted money up front, so maybe the gossip was quiet slow spreading until after MH died in 2012.

Maybe they didn't do anything untoward/ to attract attention while there, kept their heads down. They may not have been going by Walker, but if they were it's common enough.

TonstantWeader · Today 11:27

@WhoDaresWinns Polruan is the other end of 2 countries from Pwllheli so v v unlikely that anyone in Cornwall would know of dodginess in NW Wales. It's the ideal reinvention IMO.

It is also second-home owner land. This weekend I should think the population would have tripled.

There is one passenger ferry and a car ferry further up the R. Fowey. The yachts are moored on the Polruan side with water taxis that can be ordered to take you for a meal in Fowey.

When they did venture out they were noticed - she says. Also Polruan blogger and man who met Moth, when he said he was a lecturer,

Do we know when the work was done? I assumed it was before the embezzlement news broke.

who was the polruan blogger?

It's much easier to keep to yourself when you are new in a village, if you keep your head down as @unicorn2 says, first locals want to find out about you, so they can pass on the info about the newcomers to the other locals, whoever they encountered would have been told.

Whatever they had contrived, after that most people would then just leave them alone. You have to make an effort to join in and integrate in most places and as @TheBrandyPath is saying, even easier to be less noticeable when there are lots of people coming and going for holidays.

This was the very point I made a while ago - only I got 2013 events confused with the 2008 Llandudno abandonment! (My excuse - there's so much info. both true, half true and imagined that it's easily to mis-remember, I should have consulted the timeline.)
The account of "the walk" starts on p40 of TSP, chapter 5, "Homeless" , "on the side of the road in Taunton". IMHO this, the opening section which sets the scene for what follows, is completely fictitious. The bus journey to Minehead seems especially contrived.
Probably the true story will never be revealed but I have a strong suspicion that they retained one of the vehicles for use as a mobile base whilst deciding the best way forward. Of course they may well have wild camped on the way to Cornwall where we know they spent the winter there.
But I'm still puzzled as to SW's motive - not in actually writing TSP but in attempting to have "her little book" published - and risk it becoming a best seller.

I don't know @crossedlines I don't think the garage man is in the timeline.

I don't imagine that even in her wildest dreams, prior to publication that SW ever imagined that TSP would become the phenomenon that it has. Unless that tarot reader in St Ives was right all along: Give time for what you must do and you will have what you desire the most.

He was the one who said we just knew them as Tim and Sally. Then when there was more publicity they called her Rain and Wind.

do you have the blog link?

Her Bio ‘So Much To Tell’ is worth a read. Her made up random prizes at Club & impromptu Puffin Isle trips are hilarious. Never happen now! Her romantic life very sad. Married to Ronald Searle for a time.

Found the blog:

Yesterday afternoon, I joined a group of friends and neighbours who drove to the cinema in Bodmin to see a film featuring a couple who were once welcomed into our village and given shelter in the old Wesleyan Church, which stands proudly overlooking the harbour.
When they arrived, penniless, halfway through their quest to complete the 630 mile South West Coast Path, they were just another couple down on their luck.
During their sojourn, we got to know them, and I was rather surprised to hear a woman being interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 one morning, whose voice I recognised and whose story seemed familiar.
She was introduced as Raynor Wynn, but that was not the name she bore when she arrived in our village. When we met them, they were Sally And Timothy. However, later on we called her Rain and Wind.

They appear to have been going by their real names, but if we're to believe TWS, SW was a recluse, either staring at the wall in the flat/writing, or dashing, panic-stricken, through the village to get back onto the SWCP, while TW drove to university or studied at home, so perhaps not surprising people didn't really know them, far less hear any dark rumours emanating from the Llyn peninsula?

I've always found that Polruan blogger post quoted above by @WhoDaresWinns but previously linked by other posters slightly odd. He or she gives the impression the Walkers were a known charity case -- a 'penniless', 'down on their luck' couple who were 'welcomed into our village and given shelter in the Old Wesleyan Church', rather than just two people who moved to Polruan. Or is this hindsight, written after having seen the film and/or read TSP?

This blogger also says that when they moved to Polruan they were only 'halfway through their quest to complete the 630 mile SWCP'. Again, is this just a mistake (Polruan being roughly halfway) or an indication that they hadn't walked the full path when they arrived in Polruan?

Many people as we know suffer extreme bad fortune and end up losing their businesses/livelihoods but for a couple in their early fifties to lose their home and become 'penniless' because she CHOSE the path to calculated and sustained embezzlement is hapless, criminal, disgraceful and deserving of zero sympathy imo. I do have sympathy for the loss of TW's health whatever the diagnosis/ symptoms but the rest, absolutely not.

He was mentioned in the original expose as being owed £800 is my recollection, but as you say, there's no specific timeline on that. I'd also assumed they'd run that bill up at or around the same time as MH was discovering the extent of what had happened to him.

@YarrowYarrow The Walkers seem to have done some of the north coast in 2013. With help from family in Somerset and Newquay

Then they got somewhere to stay in Polruan - convenient for Tim's 3 year course.

They then did a series of walks in different parts of the southern path, at various times - 2015 meeting the Parsons. Probably up until preparing the text for publication.

That's all I think.

Yes, that sounds perfectly likely. I was just interested in the fact that the Polruan neighbour seemed aware that when they arrived there, they hadn't done all the walk, which directly contradicts the narrative of TSP, which puts Polruan firmly at the end, along with the Heavily Symbolic Peregrine etc.

This article might not have been posted on here. Called Seen&Unseen, it's written from a Christian perspective. As far as I can see, they've accepted the book and film as truth. Hope link works.

https://www.seenandunseen.com/you-may-never-take-salt-path-heres-why-tale-makes-sense

FWIW some info I obtained from my DW recently :-
Firstly from a chat she had over coffee with a family friend, who had just returned from walking the SWCP - not all of it I hasten to add, but a walking holiday with "baggage transfer" as described and envied by SW in TSP. Friend went with her sister, they started at Padstow and each daily section entailed walking approx. 7 miles/11km. (These holidays must be very well organised as I've never heard of anyone getting lost!)
They were met at the end point by a taxi which took them to an hotel for the night. Wife was not sure where they ended up but per Google the most expensive "walking holiday" was quoted at £1000. Probably quite reasonable when taking hotel accommodation/taxi services into account.
Then also recently - so in the wake of the Observer revelations - DW attended a book club meeting at which TSP was on the list for discussion! DW had read both TSP and TWS pre-Observer and at least one club member had read the book after the Observer story broke. As far as I can gather they all agreed TSP was complete nonsense and swiftly moved on to discuss the other titles selected for that month's session!

...accidentally quoted this post...

Another inconsistency that I forgot to flag a while back.

In TSP when the daughter phones for a second time after Raymoth leave Tintagel (without paying for 2 nights' camping), she says she's "been offered a job with a PR company in London and they needed her to start straight away. How would she get back? She was already on the train; she’d worked it out for herself."

The inconsistency is that the daughter actually graduated from a northern university the year after, which makes her rushing back to start a job at a PR company rather questionable.

On the face of it, this might not seem particularly important, yet it is clear how this call and the previous one function as narrative devices. To explain, this phone call bookends the first call 3 days previously when the daughter is waiting for a bus in Venice, a call that prompts RW afterwards to have an emotional breakdown and parental identity crisis, and she writes about being a farmer, a farmer's daughter, belonging to the land etc etc.

So if the call never happened in 2013 on the walk, did the emotional meltdown happen? Perhaps RW merely changed the details or did have such a conversation on another part of the walk in 2014. We simply don't know, but it does cast doubt on what to believe.

@AzureStaffy the date on that link is June 2025, so before the Observer expose. I'd be fascinated to know what that blog author thinks now! Material for a follow up blog post on forgiveness? Or 'hate the sin, love the sinner'? 😉