Thread 19: 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 ...

First thread: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film? | Mumsnet

Links to threads 2-16, the other 20 Observer articles and videos to date, Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement, our timeline and sources can all be accessed in the OP and first few posts of Thread 17: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5403285-thread-17-to-feel-disappointed-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film?

Thread 18: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5422393-thread-18-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 exposé items 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 drive-by scolders 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. Over four months we have done amazingly well together for 18 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.

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

"I'll fight anyone who says I'll make it to Christmas 2021!"

Quite how ETTC picked up a property over which there had been a long contested court case, and where there were two chargeholders possibly working to inflate the asking price, is an interesting question?

https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/housingpriceslocal/W06000002/

The attached graph shows the reduction in local house prices due to 2008 was largely over by 2010 - so it strikes me that the property was significantly over valued at the time of ETTC given the much lower value at which it sold in 2016 when if anything there had been a slight recovery in local prices.

Are we back to the due diligence question again? Whether interested parties would have checked for an existing mortgage on the house.

Though it's an odd, unusual situation, anyway, an uncle of TW's apparently ready to provide an immediate loan of £100k to prevent the wife of his nephew from going to prison, combined with the savviness to get legal advice that successfully prevented the victim of the embezzlement from speaking about it or taking any further action against her, BUT who is also hard-headed enough to get that generous, large loan secured against his nephew and the nephew's miscreant wife's home, when he must surely have known there was very little chance of them being able to repay it?

Would he have checked via a third party whether they already had a mortgage, as distinct from asking them and believing their reply?

SW had presumably stopped working for the Hemmingses at this point, and it's not clear whether TW was working at the time. Two unemployed people aren't going to be able to keep up repayments on their normal mortgage, far less repay an additional 'private mortgage' on top.

I can imagine that when the uncle's company failed, and the two creditors bought the debt, they'd go after whatever they could.

But again, it seems a bit of a wild goose chase to spend years paying your legal representation to take a repayment enforcement through the courts if you knew the property whose sale you were enforcing was heavily mortgaged, and that the mortgage lender superseded you in terms of repayments on the completion of a sale.

I think there is some other element to this whole story which has yet come to light - the behaviour of James and those to whom he transferred the Walker's debt who then started their fruitless wild goose chase suggests to me that they were not in full possession of the facts at the time and may well have been misled regarding other assets being available (and which may possibly have come to light if there had been a bankruptcy).

It has always been pretty easy to check with the Land Registry if there are charges registered against any property, and it would be pretty negligent of two sets of legal advisors not to do so before making the loan to the Walkers or commencing court action for its recovery.

Walking helps reverse brain disease. Why? because Raynor says so.

Health benefits of walking: cancer and diabetes risk reduces, immune system strengthens – and as one couple found, it helped reverse brain disease | South China Morning Post

A quick digression. I was interested to see that (after The Observer article) a journalist in The Sun said that RW had described CBD as referring to multiple diseases:

"When Moth was diagnosed in 2013 it was suspected he’d already had CBD for six years. Today, he is not only still alive, he lacks acute symptoms and is going on walks.
Raynor told me: “There are many, many theories that swirl around, and there’s very little fact, because these illnesses that come under the umbrella of CBD.
“They don’t receive much funding because they’re so rare, and so we understand very little about them.”"

I heard something today about an artist called David Shrigley (Turner Prize nominee) who took 6000 copies of the Da Vinci Code (which the charity shops were rejecting due to how many copies they got offered) pulped them and used the materials to do a special run of Orwell's 1984.

It seems he's considered doing it again.

We could make a suggestion, don't you think?

“There are many, many theories that swirl around, and there’s very little fact, because these illnesses that come under the umbrella of CBD*.
“They don’t receive much funding because they’re so rare, and so we understand very little about them.”*

How convenient 🙄

They could be transformed into toilet paper.

Now, that would be an effective piece of art!

Mind you, Salray could have had a great future at the Ministry of Truth, until she decided to embezzle from Big Brother of course.

Imagine TSP written in Newspeak!!

SW attributes some fairly unflattering remarks about Rowena Cade to the son of one of the gardeners at the Minack, who happens to be sitting next to her and Moth during the Iolanthe performance.

"in the early 1930s, Rowena Cade decided it would be a great idea to have a theatre at the end of the garden, somewhere to stage plays by the local dramatic society. So she moved half the hillside to create one. So it says in the brochure, but as with all such projects, the gardeners did the work and she instructed and pottered around with a little wheel-barrow, or so the man sitting next to me said, and he would know, as his father was one of the gardeners. Or so he said."

From what I've been able to dig up, there is zero chance that SW met the son of the head gardener (Billy Rawlings) or his brother in law (Charles Angove) as both their sons had died by 2013.

The Minack Theatre also paint a quite different picture of Rowena Cade than her description in TSP.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1Frsr5fDsp/

It's quite interesting to read the comments on the FB article about Rowena Cade by many people who actually met her and contrast it with the implicitly critical account of her in TSP.

Thanks for sharing that - it was really interesting. From the description at the top of the FB post, Rowena sounds like the sort of person that RW sees herself as!

Oh, I think it’s just a classic SW glumwashing instance. In case we might think Rowena Cade was admirable, SW just wants to make sure she’s alerted us to the unsung underdog heroes who are like them, the people who did the manual work and got none of the glory. Except in this case, Rowena Cade seems to have been extremely hands on, and to have held Billy Rawlings in particularly in high esteem.

We’re supposed to identify the Walkers, who ‘lovingly restored’ their farm with their own hands, with the unsung builders. In this view, Rowena Cade is rich and lordly and Pollyish.

Mind you, as people pointed out many threads ago, the whole Minack part is quite unconvincing. The conversation with the actors has always struck me as completely fictional, based on the idea that Cambridge student actors would speak in some kind of luvvie stereotype language.

Thank you so much for looking into this and questioning the received wisdom of Sally Walker. For decades, I have understood Rowena to be very well thought of in Cornwall. Therein lies her mistake to the thinking of SalRay.

How dare someone be a better woman than Sal? Look at the scathing comments in her statement referencing Ros Hemmings. How dare Jo Parsons walk far more of the SWCP - she's just a pig who needs her roots done.

This book seems more and more like The Spite Path. Anyway, keep up the questioning - I need to calm down again for now! 🤕

What I find particularly galling about the whole Minack episode is that after dismissing the lady who devoted her life to building the theatre with her bare hands from the rock face as an idle dilettante aristo and then doing the same with the actors (feckless privately educated thesps with posh names like Gerald who spend their time on stage casually texting their girlfriends when they should have been reciting their lines) whom they allegedly meet in the van after the performance, Sal then had the nerve to revisit the Minack several years later (July 2022) with Gigspanner and lap up the plaudits from the sell out performance as if she was the real and rightful star of the show.

The drumming and throbbing of Estren/The Three Knights was an uplifting finale to Raynor's moving memoir, and the whole audience stood to salute a beautiful experience.

“The Spite Path”, yes indeed. She’s such a horrible person by all accounts, it’s quite upsetting to see the two faces of Sal.
@NaughtyNoodler that makes me seethe.

So a Sun journalist, rather than asking an actual, you know, qualified doctor, took the world of 'Raynor', someone with a more-than-vested-interest in the whole 'Moth has CBD' argument?

I wonder if they'd like to interview me on Frozen Shoulder and how I think it might be caused by my being forced to do housework? I've got a whole diatribe prepared on why I should be given daily help to do everything around the house rather than doing it myself in case it exacerbates my symptoms (currently kept under control by walking....)

Hope you're feeling better @BecalmedBrandy .

'The Spite Path' is perfect. Snidey, sneering little jibes at someone who achieved something that is a public good, that also seem to be a figment of her misanthropic imagination (thanks for the digging @NaughtyNoodler )

Salray's contribution to society is hardly massive, including as it does dodging the law and becoming rich from books based on lies.

I'm one of SW's fiercest critics but I'm willing to admit that she has done some good (even if that peripheral good doesn't excuse all the other "stuff" that we have discussed on the last 19 threads).

Namely:

1. Inspired a lot of people to go and walk the SWCP, 99.99% of whom don't have CBD
2. She has raised awareness of CBD, even if Moth probably doesn't have it, and has raised money for PSPA, even if the claimed health benefits of arduous long distance walks appear to have zero factual basis rooted in science..
3. She has possibly marginally helped raise awareness of rural homelessness in Cornwall, even if she and Moth were never homeless in any true sense of the word and don't have any particularly original insights or solutions to offer about the issue.

Gillian Anderson has been interviewed by Marie Claire recently and wasn't asked about TSP revelations - though it wasn't of course up to her to do fact checking. She mentions how she dislikes how women are often manipulated against other women.

This below is a long piece about GA and the film with lots of photos - I think it dates from shortly before The Observer article.

https://gillianderson.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/the-salt-path/

Sure to your last point, I agree. But only to the same extent as someone like Simon Reeves did in his Cornwall documentaries.

(Which, if you haven't seen them, are very good on how a county can be a glorious holiday destination and also one of the poorest parts of the country -- he had a whole long concentration on seasonal workers living in caravans/ sheds/makeshift accommodation because they can't afford local rents, and a Newquay hotel which wasn't filling its rooms and was instead offering them as emergency accommodation for homeless people, and a very cool man who ran a foodbank in Camborne (Cambourne?) who ended up getting a huge number of donations from viewers of the programme.)

And I suppose one wants to point out that SR has actually been a knife-carrying teenage runaway with a criminal record and an unsafe home, significant MH problems, and a generally crappy start, with no inventions or embellishments. His sense of social responsibility seems to stem from that, and I like that about his travel programmes. It's not bolted on. Whereas I do feel that it is in TSP.

I assume the Cornwall programmes are on the iPlayer.

I'm less sure about the CBD awareness-raising. I don't know how much money the Walkers raised, and obviously that can never be a bad thing. But the PSPA charity clearly decided immediately that whatever they had done for the charity didn't outweigh bringing its name into disrepute...?

I know some people were critical of them for dropping the Walkers so fast, but I suppose I see their point.

An investigative journalist credibly casting significant doubt on TW's diagnosis and uncovering that SW embezzled a significant sum of money in a situation of trust and lied about it in her bestseller, both arguably removes the whole reason why they would have been high-profile ambassadors for the charity, and would stoke public distrust of what might happen to any donations made as a result of the Walkers' fundraising.

I don't know about the SWCP awareness-raising, either. Isn't it suffering from bad erosion because of the sheer numbers using it? I can't remember whether SW talks about that in TSP, but it comes up more than once in Simon Armitage's Walking Away, that sections of the path have had to be 'migrated' inland because of erosion, and the problems that causes with landowners, permissions etc.

I'd be more worried about anyone SW says something nice about.