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.

Repossessed properties especially if they have been unoccupied for 3 years often sell for substantial discounts.

https://www.waterstones.com/book/on-winter-hill/raynor-winn/2928377337544

Waterstones are still selling copies of OWH prior to publication - and the book appears to have AH illustrations - all suggesting that it was pretty near to publication. I hope AH has been paid.

A few years ago my neighbour's house featured on ETTC. They said the programme makers approached the estate agent looking for suitable property in the area that would fit the episode they wanted to make. My neighbour's house ticked the boxes. I don't know if they got paid or were just pleased to have a bit of free marketing and a 'telly' story to tell.

But 'unflinchingly honest' the programme was not. Considerable licence was taken over the proximity of the pretty 'local' church and 'ancient village green'. Our actual parish church is a brutal 60s affair down an unprepossessing side road and the nearest green is a council recreation ground. The film crew instead embellished the episode with shots of the entirely separate 'chocolate box' village 4 miles and a proper car drive away.

@Fandango52 But fear not, everyone - all will be revealed about this sorry tale in my upcoming ‘unflinchingly honest’ book. I’m planning to call it ‘The Great Disconnect: How I Lost My Phone But Found Myself’. I’m currently in talks with a few publishing houses about next steps - stay tuned 😉

I'll publish it for you. I've got a house to sell and fancy a raffle.

I think the title's missing a second language. With the help of online translation, I think The Great Disconnect: Sut Collais Fy Ffôn Ond Wedi Dod o Hyd i Fy Hun has a certain je ne sais quoi about it. [Any Welsh speakers, please correct my errors! Diolch yn fawr.]

Shall we team up? And if you’re happy to join forces, dare I ask the milllion dollar question: do you want to be Ray or would you rather be Moth?

Popping back briefly as I've been absent for a few threads but I figure I can borrow a trick from the WalkerWinns and as long as I stay the odd night of the route I can say I did the whorm thing

We bought a repossessed house - although it was only empty for around 6 months.
It had been on the market for about a year at around £500 and we paid around half that, which was what the bank was asking.

I’m still laughing at an episode of Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild set on the Blaskets in summer. If anyone doesn’t know the premise of the show, BF spends a week living with someone who has chosen to live ‘in the wild’, usually somewhere remote.

The Great Blasket, absolutely, is now uninhabited and three miles off the Kerry mainland, but the owner of some of the restored village houses advertises annually for a couple to spend April to October living there to run the cafe and cottages where you can stay overnight, and unless the weather is so bad the boats can’t run, the place is really busy.

But BF and his crew clearly either filmed before the season started, or after it ended, or shut down the boats for the duration of their shoot, and gave the impression that the island was deserted apart from the couple, seals and sheep.

But remember it wasn’t a bank that repossessed the house. The two businessmen who acquired Pen y Maes by calling in the 100K loan plus interest must have had an unpleasant surprise when they found out there was a 230K mortgage attached. They probably instructed the estate agent to put a high price on it to recoup as much as possible of their loss. The WW left in 2013 and it went on the market soon after, in February 2014, for 299k.

It is easy to see where the inflated figures of 395k and 435k came from. Just add 230k (the mortgage) to the amount the 100k loan at 18% had grown into: 118k after one year, 139k after two years, 164k after three, and so on…frightening really. They must have been pretty desparate.

If anyone's going to pair up and be Pseudoray and Pseudomoth, they'll need pseudonyms.

Can I suggest Beam and Butter(fly)?

Or Mothman. Yes, I can see Tim as Mothman, a brooding hunched figure with 'hypnotic eyes'...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothman

I think the moment when Raynor says 'Mothman BSc' is the most cringe-inducing moment of all three books.

… and that bar is on the floor.
I’ve realised that with hindsight I find every sentence she constructs, cringe making.

Quite misleading on the release date for OWH. I googled today and AI was saying that general release was Oct 2026 but there was a limited release of a special edition on 23 Oct 2025 for inde bookshops. However, looking into it, I think that Inde bookshops just haven't updated their listing's BUT Amazon UK are also showing release as 23 Oct 2025.

It’s a useful example of how AI gets it wrong so often. Though I feel sure that someone, somewhere is saying ‘Now rewrite my book about sea swimming with cancer in the style of Raynor Winn.’

I didn't like that Mothman image the first time it was posted on the threads and it hasn't improved! <shudders>

And I say that as someone very fond of the bats in my attic. 😆

This is from 2 days ago: The Salt Path film premiered on Prime Video on 5 September in the UK.

"https://www.tomsguide.com/entertainment/streaming/watch-the-salt-path-online-streaming"

It seems some are still diluting the lies the WWs have told:

"Based on a "true story", there has been some controversy around the details in Raynor Winn's original book of the same title but that does not change the central message about hope and never giving up in the face of adversity. An inspirational tale for unsettled and unsettling times."

I'd say it does change the central message about hope and never giving up in adversity because the majority of that adversity never existed.

The film is still not available in the USA.

Anyone who has read TWS please remind me about the section RW wrote about her mother - does she write about staying at her old childhood home on the farm during her mum's illness? (Apologies, I've probably asked this before but lost in the threads to find previous answers).

No, she visits the cottage her mother lived in before entering hospital to pick up things for her, walks onto the farm, and looks at the house she grew up in, but never says where she’s staying. I’m assuming her mother moved out of that big farmhouse after her father’s death (or perhaps they’d left long before). She’s certainly still giving the impression that her father was the tenant farmer, though, not the stockman.

I was watching something yesterday that made me wonder... it was to do with brain injuries linked to repeated head injury and they were talking about Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. Then someone called it CTE and I thought - I wonder if it was mentioned in connection with Tim? And Sally misheard it, went home and Googled and came up with CBD instead?

CTE can result in movement problems and mood swings and I just wondered whether, given that Tim fell off a roof and seems to have been rather accident prone generally, whether someone, perhaps a GP muttered something about it and she took it and ran? The CBD came into things later - particularly if SW had convinced herself that's what it was and she kept mentioning it to doctors - they seem to have gone down the 'CBS-like illness' route, but I wonder if they'd had the idea planted by someone?

CTE might sound a bit like CBD, if someone is just mentioning it in passing, and SW is just the type to go for the massive overreaction and worst case scenario diagnosis, particularly if aided by Dr Google.

Going on newspaper notices and articles, the uncle gave up the tenancy in the late eighties at which point the pasture land was "apportioned to other local farmers." From this point, different planning applications were submitted by the owner for redevelopment of the buildings into new homes, none of which appear to have gone through. When the uncle died in the mid nineties, his will and probate both show SWs father as one of the trustees and gives his address as being at the farm. TWS mentions him still being at the farmhouse towards the end of his life in 2001. Maybe they kept him on as a caretaker?

Don’t you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one’s been!

I got left behind, and was then detained in an area known as Thread 16. @cricketandwhodunnits came back to contact us and I got released to get back to the rest of you.

I had time to think through my past (what a good idea that would be!), to address the current atmosphere and to reference the 'second' book -TWS.

For @DisappointedReader (and anyone else who remembers} this will identify me:

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find
Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,
Don’t you shout to come and look, nor use ‘em for your play.
Put the brishwood back again – and they’ll be gone next day!
(Rudyard Kipling)

To be honest, I'd rather watch the wall than watch the TSP film...

Or he had a life tenancy of the house as former stockman?

SW's implication that her father was the tenant, and wanted to pass it on to one of his daughters, and his anger and sadness when he found that it couldn't be done, plus the statement that this was why she stopped writing as a child, because she was going to have to make a life off the farm, is still a somewhat mystifying fiction, even if we conclude that her father was hoping to 'inherit' the tenancy from the uncle and was disappointed when he was told no by the landowner. I mean, it seems unnecessary to concoct it. It doesn't seem to serve any particular purpose.