Thread 17: 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)
Links to more Observer videos can be found in an early post of this new thread and here: Observer YouTube Channel: The Observer UK - YouTube
Working timeline and references: can be found in early posts of this new Thread 17.
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?
Threads 13-14: Links in the OP of Thread 15
Thread 15:Thread 15: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet
Thread 16: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5395002-thread-16-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 are welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from at least some of the Observer items above before posting.
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 sixteen 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 17. I'm as in need of smelling salts as the next person.

We seek them here, we seek them there, mumsnetters seek them everywhere: just where are the elusive How not to Dal dy Dir and On Winter Hill?

#handwavium #appropriation

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

I realise Salray had to write that they were ahead of SA in order to make this mistaken identity thing seem in anyway feasible, but again it's the, we are doing it for real and SA is somehow trailing after them. These threads have shown how unlikely it is that they were even walking then, as for people in their generosity bringing cake meant for SA what nonsense, especially as they complain about how mean most people they encountered are.

The piece about the old ladies, made me think of the sister characters in the Walton's who were always a little confused after taking their late father's remedy :)

Maybe they were so anxious not to miss SA - they over-compensated to avoid this:

THREE OLD LADIES

Oh, dear, what can the matter be?
Three old ladies looked for the Laureate
They were there from morning to midnight
Nobody knew he was there

Disclaimer: poetic licence was exercised in the penning of this ditty. "It's not real".

Never mind the lack of similarity between SA and Timmoth. SA did the SWCP in 2013 and I thought it was pretty much identified that the Walkers were there in 2015?

In which case, those old ladies were even more confused than it initially seemed!

Or am I misunderstanding something?

Bill Clinton has apparently always been similar since boyhood.

For someone with the X factor, Moth would appear not to have used it re: business progression etc. Ray seems to have made some poor decisions in part to keep him in style to which he’d like to be accustomed.

@BeguiledSilence 😂it relies on Our Simon, down to earth Yorkshireman, geography grad, former probation officer and possessor of a uni mate called Slug (all pluses in my view) taking on the mantle and glamour of Lord Byron in the eyes of the path adjacent.

Bill Clinton has apparently always been similar since boyhood.

For someone with the X factor, Moth would appear not to have used it re: business progression etc. Ray seems to have made some poor decisions in part to keep him in style to which he’d like to be accustomed.

I certainly think some parts were done in 2015 (hence encounter with the Parsons)

That’s interesting about OS, because I caught the end of Schindler’s List recently, and went on Wikipedia to see what had happened in the rest of his life after the war.

And I was (possibly naively) surprised that it was a catalogue of repeated failures and bankruptcies. He tried farming in South America after the war with some partial compensation for his expenditures, but it failed, and he left his wife and returned to Germany in the late 1950s and tried lots of other business ventures, none of which worked. He survived mostly on donations from the Schindlerjuden until he died in 1974.

It’s interesting that all that evident charisma wasn’t monetisable.

(His wife’s life after he left her is very sad — she only died in 2001. I hadn’t realised either that OS’s two children were not by his wife but by his mistress.)

Anyway, complete thread derail, sorry!

I suppose it made me think that the Walkers’ show has stayed on the road so far in part because they appear to present a totally united front. That’s the ‘brand’ —devoted teenage sweethearts faced with a terminal diagnosis for one.

I was just rereading the St Ives Beowulf busk episode and it hadn’t struck me before how SW represents herself as panicking when TW runs off back to the campsite, saying ‘Stay there or I won’t find you again’. She says they haven’t been apart since they left Wales, and that she feels he’s taken half of her with him, like a half-eaten pasty (a gull just stole her half of their shared pasty), and starts saying that nursery rhyme about the man with seven wives on the way to St Ives. She then imagines TW packing up his rucksack and taking off without her, and then, weirdly, she says ‘No, he wouldn’t do that; I had the money’!

She goes on to say that of course his diagnosis means he will be leaving her for good, and she will be forever half a pasty, but isn’t that quite a weird thing to say? The moment he’s out of her sight, she imagines him leaving her, and the reason she reassures herself he won’t isn’t that he loves her, but that he literally can’t leave her because she’s got all their money in her purse?

Anyway. It just struck me that if that supposedly all-powerful bond were to crumble, it could get ugly. The ‘brand’ doesn’t include anything as banal as infidelity, sexual restlessness etc. TW hasn’t worked in a long time (did he work since finishing his degree?) and is locked into the brand as devoted, free-spirited and doomed. But it’s her name on the books. That’s hot to create some power imbalances.

Anyway. It just struck me that if that supposedly all-powerful bond were to crumble, it could get ugly. The ‘brand’ doesn’t include anything as banal as infidelity, sexual restlessness etc. TW hasn’t worked in a long time (did he work since finishing his degree?) and is locked into the brand as devoted, free-spirited and doomed. But it’s her name on the books. That’s hot to create some power imbalances.

I think this is very true @Pissenlit . It's all built on a heap of sand anyway and it wouldn't take much for it to crumble.

The things you cite about her panicking when he goes out of her sight are really quite telling. It isn't how most people think, is it, even under unusual circumstances, especially when there has been no indicator he would.

(Deraily bit, sorry)

Yes, OS seemed to lose any sort of Midas touch he had for himself after the War and everything he tried failed and the charisma he used agaisnt the frankly terrifying Amon Goethe didn't make him successful in business. He spent a lot of time in Israel but also in Germany, where he was less welcome, to put it mildly. The Schindlerjuden saved him and from what I've read, were happy to. I'm glad Emilie was given the honour of Righteous, because she was closely involved in the rescue too and deserved it.

This is the Timeline for our Threads. I have deleted the entries that are only in TSP and left those with independent corroboration. I added a few snippets which were in the press, taken from contemporary social media.

March 2012
Gangani Publishing Ltd was set up with Tim Walker as Director and Tim Walker and Sally Walker as joint shareholders (Companies House)
2012
Gangani published How Not to Dal dy Dir by Izzy Wyn-Thomas (Sally Walker). Those who bought the book told they were entered into a prize draw to win a house in Wales ‘free from mortgage or any other legal…charge’ (Observer ‘The Slow Newscast’ podcast, 29 July 2025; Gangani Publishing, 2012)
February 2012
Creditors called in the loan, then exceeding £150,000. Judge ordered payment within 12 months or house would be repossessed (Observer, The Salt Path what’s in the book and what The Observer has found, 6 July 2025)
December 2012
Christmas present, from Walkers to relative, is holiday in Rome
June 2013
Pen y Maes repossessed (The Salt Path, 2018); The Walkers left under cover of darkness according to a local farmer (The Times, The Salt Path scandal: what Raynor Winn’s former neighbours think, 11 July 2025); The Walkers hid under the stairs as the bailiffs arrived (The Salt Path, 2018)
July 2013
Gangani Publishing Ltd dissolved (Companies House)
July 2013
Surfing at Newquay
29 August – 17 September 2013
Simon Armitage walked from Minehead to Land’s End (Guardian, Simon Armitage to walk south-west coast path, 19 February 2013)
17 September 2013
Sally and Tim Walker’s son drove them from Cornwall to Bristol (Observer, Shock and anger: the real people in The Salt Path, 13 August 2025)
6 February 2015
Sally and Tim Walker’s son helps them move (Observer, Shock and anger: the real people in The Salt Path, 13 August 2025)
25 June 2015
Tim Walker diagnosed with possible corticobasal syndrome symptoms (CBS), although these symptoms are ‘indolent’ and ‘mild’ (Raynor Winn website, medical letters, released July 2025)
8 August 2015
Joanne and David Parson meet the Walkers at the Fat Apples Café, near Porthallow, an event that, according to Sally Walker in The Salt Path, took place in summer 2013 (Observer, We thought: it can’t be the Salt Path couple…, 9 August 2025)
Autumn 2015
Tim Walker began either a horticulture HND or degree, with full student loan funding for a first undergraduate qualification (Falmouth Packet, Eden students take award winning garden to Hampton Court Flower Show, 8 July 2016; The Salt Path, 2018)

@pissenlit (did he work since finishing his degree?

In TWS - I stood on the railway platform in Par, waving to the train as it pulled away east, choking on tears like a child parted from its favourite toy. Moth’s degree had consolidated a lifetime of knowledge, adding a layer of design skills that were now needed by an unexpected client two hundred miles away. We’d agonized for days over his decision to go. Could he make the journey alone? Would he remember where to
go? Could he do the work when he got there?

There had to be another way. I replied to a message from Moth, reminding him where he’d put the list of train times. I had to do something, or I’d spend the next week checking my phone and worrying.

SW then returns to the farm, reads Copsford and tries to get rid of the mice.

This is the only mention I can remember but there may be more.

Yeah when you are prone to brain fog, you definitely text someone to ask where the train times are. Like you know you have them but don’t check the obvious places like your bag or pockets, so instead you text. Especially the train times that you need even though you’re already on the train. FFS.

OK, so if Moth is sooooooo charismatic and all, how come people keep mistaking them for tramps (allegedly)? Why isn't Moth using his 'power' for good, to charm free food and accommodation out of people? I understand that it's a thing that can be turned on and off (personally I leave mine on mute, just to save energy), but what's the point in being a sparkly and charismatic personality when you're being turned away from places and you're really hungry and/or in need of a lift or ferry?

Shine your light, Moth, mate, don't let Sally starve....

And yet we have no evidence he actually graduated. And only Salray's dubious account of this work.

Being totally cynical: there are 3 themes running through TSP 1) The plight of the homeless 2) Dealing with being given a diagnosis of an extremely serious terminal neurological condition 3) Walking the 630 miles of the SWCP over 13 months and it's beneficial impact on stabilising/reversing the serious neurological condition.

In order to make TSP marketable, it was in the Walkers' interests to hype up all three themes even though there was nothing from their appearance or behaviour to distinguish them from regular ramblers (or wandering poets!). None of the accounts of people who have walked the SWCP (the Parsons etc) and were homeless, suggests that they were shunned by those they met or vilified as tramps in the manner SW describes in TSP.

The neurological condition wasn't discovered until June 2015 by when the walk described in TSP was meant to have finished at Polruan in October 2014. The diagnosis wasn't definitive and referred to a very mild neurological condition most resembling CBS but that it was indolent and atypical. There was certainly no sense that the specialist had given Moth a maximum of 2 years to live, as is sometimes inferred in TSP. Again for the narrative arc, SW latched onto the worst possible scenario of a person who had been given a definitive diagnosis of CBD and retro fitted that into the narrative of the walk in 2013/14.

As far at the beneficial impact of walking is concerned. Well, if TW had some form of Parkinson's and not CBD (ie the 2015 diagnosis was erroneous) then there is evidence which suggests that exercise can benefit the condition. But as the evidence ( witnesses who did meet the Walkers on the walk) only exists from when they started at Minehead (8 or 13 Aug) to when they finished up at Lands End (16 Sept) there's not much evidence to suggest that the walk did do Moth any good ( doubts have been raised about the incident at Portheras Cove/ the mug shot at LE may have been cropped to disguise the fact that Moth looks pretty knackered) which may explain why they finished up at LE and got a lift back to Bristol where their son rather than continuing with the walk (as claimed in TSP after the episode (largely discredited) at the Minack Theatre with the cast of Iolanthe.

So essentially, in my opinion, 95% of the events described on the walk were either invented or heavily embellished and the main themes were massively exaggerated because without them what would TSP have been? A rather boring 5 week walk from Minehead to Land's End (followed by some bite sized follow up walks on the SWCP in the ensuing 3 years) by a couple who were temporarily homeless in the summer of 2013 but did have a support network (friends and family) who could accommodate them until they were able to afford accommodation of their own by accessing a student loan so that they weren't sleeping on the streets in bleak midwinter and never had to face the challenges that many homeless people in the UK face.

@Catwith69lives Thank you for your summary. In a nutshell - I agree.

@Catwith69lives I agree. I don't, for one second, think any of what SW wrote about actually happened the way she wrote it. I think some of the events might have occurred in a much lesser way or that they thought about or discussed them happening, but then she elaborated on them just to make a book.After all, someone curling their nose up at you once in a cafe isn't 'bookworthy'. If it happens time and again and you can weave a plot strand out of the 'otherness' of being homeless and unkempt - you can monetise it.

In another life, if Raynor Winn had walked the SWCP as Sally Walker, and had had a sense of humour, I like to think that she would have mentioned the particularly steep section of the SWCP between Perranporth and Portreath called - Sally's Bottom!

It’s an interesting thought, @Catwith69lives, isn’t it? Quite apart from a missed joke opportunity, at what point in the writing, agent-seeking, and/or editorial process did SW decide to use a pen name? The famous Big Issue piece appeared under RW, didn’t it? I wonder whether she queried agents as SW or RW.

And I wonder at what point Tim became Moth? That Polruan blogger says they knew the two as Sally and Tim Walker when they moved there. The Parsons clearly met them as Sally and Tim. One assumes Dave and Julie knew them by their real names, even though they’re represented as calling them Ray and Moth in the books. Would Bill Cole, who first met them as a fan, have addressed them throughout by their ‘book’ names?

And I struggle to believe they call one another anything other than Sally and Tim in private, even if they consistently use the other names for interviews.

I do know a couple of authors who are published under names other than their real ones, and they use the names interchangeably, depending on how well you know them. For example, one author only publishes under one name - let's say Mary Murray (using fake names so I don't out myself totally), when her real name is Jenny Peace. Those who only know her in her writing persona will call her Mary, and she will answer to that, but those who know her personally outside her writing, or who know her very well anyway, will call her Jenny. She answers to both equally.

And I agree. @Catwith69lives that if SalRay had had more of a sense of humour about her, we'd feel better disposed towards her generally (I've actually got a writing talk which I sometimes give about putting humour into your work because people are far more disposed to like someone who makes them laugh).

Yes she claims that her name is Raynor Winn and she had already finished Lightly Salted Blackberries but had so far failed to find a publisher.

I think if she's set up an entire email address in the name Raynor Winn without first having a publishing deal (and therefore no NEED) to have an email address in a different name) then I'd question what she's using it for.

Authors who use pen names work in their legal names and the pen name is literally only to go on the book and be associated with their literary persona. If you don't have a literary persona, then I'd wonder why another name was necessary....

The Raynor Winn IG account was set up in October 2016...

But do we know about email addresses?

ETA because I'm getting myself confused here - any accounts set up in another name, whether email or IG or anything else really, prior to publication of TSP, show that SW was hiding her real identity for not good reason.

"walking the whole 630 miles". Hmm.