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.

She shot JI a look when he said that she couldn’t say, but he could, that they were conned out of everything. And then she deflected straight back to her script. In any forum she’s always seemed very uncomfortable with anything that might go off piste, and of course now we know why

Ros, I think?

Ah, sorry, yes. I was trying to post in a hurry.

Yes, as others have said I remember Ros Hemmings saying that. I think we thought that it may have been because he was the head gardener, at Plas yn Rhiw, but may not have had the botany degree he is attributed (I know I thought that!).

When Sally and Tim Walker settled in Cornwall no facts seem to have come with them. No birth names, no previous jobs, no history .... I wonder where Tim got his references for his university course? References need to be within the last couple of years.

I wonder what qualification he did attain? I would have thought he would have stunned us all in a photo of Mothman BSc!

Well, according to SW in TWS Tim was too modest to even think he’d passed his degree, and too out of the loop to go in and get his results, and was waiting meekly for a letter — so perhaps too modest to go to his graduation ceremony? Or too much of an unworldly free spirit to do anything as bourgeois as show up in a cap and gown to a ceremony?

Interesting that in the article in July 2016 regarding 1st year HND student Tim Walker exhibiting at the Hampton Court Garden Show he is described as being from Snowdonia. According to TSP he was living in Polruan from Oct 2014!

www.prolandscapermagazine.com/2016/07/07/cornish-garden-designed-at-eden-appears-at-the-rhs-hampton-court-palace-flower-show/

Thanks. Yes, another discrepancy although would this explain where he was based in 2014 - as we know from this that he started the course in Autumn 2015.

I have tried to look for the graduates of the course - it was awarded by Plymouth - but can't seem to find a list. The spot where he would have graduated is right where they supposedly slept under the stars one night!

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/dec/06/home-is-a-state-of-mind-you-dont-need-walls He has a habit of doing this.

Perhaps he stays out of the way because he still looks very hale and hearty, in contradiction to the storyline of a progressive and terminal decline?

I now find I can't accept anything about them without questioning. However simple.

The first sentence:
On a Thursday afternoon in August 2013, Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, set off from Minehead in Somerset

In a Good Housekeeping article it says:
they set off from Minehead on August 13, 2013

But, that would have been a Tuesday. That day in 2015 was a Thursday.

On the subject of burying animals, I have a family story about this.

My mum lived in a village in the Midlands as a child (1940s) and had ponies/horses. When one died, her parents were going to arrange for the knacker to take it but she became hysterical and made her father promise not to let that happen.

Mum was put to bed and in the morning, the horse was gone, but the earth in the field was disturbed. Her parents told her that one of her father's friends had come to help and the two men had buried the horse that night.

As a child she believed them, but doesn't seem to have ever subsequently questioned this so told me in good faith that her horse was still buried there.

The field is now owned by the community - several people whose houses backed onto it, bought it after my gran died. And quite recently, on learning of my family connection with the village, a resident (someone living in my grans old cottage, an incomer so not there in the 1940s!) asked me about the story he'd heard, about a horse buried in the field!!

This is how legends are forged ---

And did you look wistful and tell them about how Moonlight you, mum’s beloved black cob, was in the northwestern corner? 😀

It's only since the early 2000s that burying fallen stock became illegal. It is still legal to bury pets (including horses but not farm animals kept as pets) with restrictions concerning nearness to water courses and depth of burial amongst others.
So if the horse was buried and not spirited away, then it was entirely legal and it's ghost can roam the field with a clear conscience.

Oh, I assumed that @mauvishagain’s mother’s pony had been surreptitiously collected by the knacker’s van, and that a parent just removed a few sods overnight to give a plausible impression of a horse-sized grave?

Yes, I did too, that's why I said 'if'.

It's certainly the sort of thing most parents would have done.

@mycatismyworld : re-reading that Guardian article, I noticed that the journalist was surprised that they have a dog because their interactions with dogs have not always been favourable - but it was the runt of the litter and no one else wanted it, so they took it. They are "true" saints walking among us.

I liked the mention of a dog in an article by NOON (https://noon.org.uk/noon-icons/raynor-winn/)

"The daughter of a tenant farmer in Melton Mowbray, Raynor grew up in remote isolation, a self-sufficient child, more used to talking to her dog or reading books than socialising."

Particularly because I don't remember reading about any childhood pets in her books.

I did help dig my grandmother’s grave with my uncle, but (a) much smaller than a pony and (b) I was delighted she was dead, so would happily have dug a elephant-sized grave, such was my mood…

I feel, with a few tweaks, that could be the start of an interesting book.......😮😀

"There is a rawness about their representations, which makes us – the audience – care … build a connection and root for them."

I have been thinking about the TSP film.

Generally I think there was an agreement among us, on these threads, that we don't expect films to be as 'true' because they are based on a non-fiction memoir.

However, I do remember @UpfromSomerset saying that he believed TSP until he saw Jason Isaacs limping?

I am now wondering if in, some sense, the film can be more influential, especially over the health issue.

Both actors took their roles very seriously and have elaborated over how they prepared. There is a marked contrast between their respective approaches. Gillian listed to SalRay's audio tape. Commentators have referred to her strange accent.

Jason fell madly in love. He noted that TimMoth always wore bandanas and neckties - so he wore one to his meeting with the director. He then continued to wear them. He really was smitten.

The Salt Path (M) – 115 minutes

I never had JI down as a luvvie before. So disappointing!!

Yes, I do feel upset when he emphasises the hostility people along the coast path showed to them. This is in places that I love and there is no evidence for it whatsoever.

Yes you're right of course, they hadn't begun their literary deception at the time of the court case. I don't know why Timoth didn't appear rather than SalRay. There has been a lot of speculation about the nature of the dynamics in their marriage but, despite being fascinating, we're unlikely to ever know as they have an economical relationship with the truth.

Don't worry, @BeguiledSilence , it happens to us all. I said some while back that if the WWs told me it was raining, I'd open the window to check. And their nephew described them on LinkedIn as pathological liars when the story first broke, before deleting it later (screenshots on one of the early threads).

In reality, Tim might have spoken up in court. We are relying on the book’s version of what happened and that version wasn’t even the actual court case…