Thread 20 : 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?

Thread 19: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5437058-thread-19-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 and ploppers 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 five months we have done amazingly well together for 19 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.

Up and coming:

• Salt Path: A Very British Scandal, Monday 15th December 9pm Sky Documentaries and NOW
• Sunday Papers Live, The Real Salt Path with Chloe Hadjimatheou, Sunday 7th December (see image below for tickets and further details)
• Observer Newsroom: The Real Salt Path Story, Thursday 8th January 2026 6.30-7.30pm. More information and to book via this link observer.co.uk/our-events/the-real-salt-path-story

Your boss was right!

I doubt he "discovered" them.

They are in this together, she steals and commits fraud, he invents botany degrees and illnesses.

They're a team. I'm puzzled when anyone suggests it's just her.

At least now surely we can say with impunity that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with the man outside of normal ageing. Anything else is a complete fabrication.

@BegazingBrandy , it is much worse and more damning than I could have imagined too.

@SimoArmo thanks for link to the print piece. In the 'wedding photo' there is a buffet table in what I would surmise is a private home behind them so perhaps the family organised a celebration when they got back from the 'elopement', which seems like the act of supportive parents to me, or at least those who have accepted the situation.

It strikes me that as well as the typed confession, the emails supply a trail and the handwritten letters very much expose her. Surely if innocent she would go to any lengths to prove that she didn't write them/ As we've all said before, they have the money to employ specialists to prove they are being libelled. I however expect the sort of tumbleweed there has been from that camp from July to continue drifting.

Oh and Salray, kleptomania has to be diagnosed to provide any sort of mitigation in court and even with it isn't a guarantee of freedom.

New to this thread but absolutely gripped by this over the last year (also a long time listener of Tortoise,).

Has Moth or whatever his real name is, got a gambling problem? How were they burning through so much money for so long? Why haven't they given any back to the families (if only to preemptively shut them up)? She's always saying it was for him, but it's never really clear how

According to the report, the mortgage creditors had been unable to locate the Walkers until the first Observer report. Once the Walkers' new names were revealed, the creditors were able to catch up with them and get paid.

Oh, I don’t disagree, but she’s often not been that clever about what she’s put in writing, has she? I mean, there’s clearly a fairly hefty paper trail of letters etc from SW to family members confessing to the various thefts (including the Hemmingses embezzlement which only a few months ago in her last statement she denied doing, saying only that ‘mistakes were made’).

But what’s blowing my mind completely here (other than cold-blooded thefts of large sums from her own mother and the Walker parents, to the point where she’d wiped out her mother’s savings, ensuring she struggled to pay for food and heating, and meant TW’s parents could no longer pay their rent and moved into their son and DIL’s barn), is that, she writes about having committed the Hemmings theft in a supposed novel she then attempted to use in a dodgy prize draw aimed at making money to repay a debt incurred to cover up the real-life crime!’

Thank you @Aussiebornandbred, well, well, well, that was interesting :)

It's confirmed a lot of things, I'm interested by the plot of the raffle book, it sounds like Salray did write the truth, or something closer to it.

It fascinates me that the story has taken this long to come out. The scale of the deception is much bigger than it originally seemed. At first it looked as if she'd lied about the reason they were homeless, embellished the story of the walk and possibly exaggerated her husband's symptoms. But it now looks as if she lied on a grand scale about everything: they didn't do the walk, they were never homeless and Moth wasn't really ill. Add to the fact that they stole vast sums of money from both his and her parents - it's absolutely breathtaking. What utterly terrible people.

Why didn't come out earlier? We know that some of the people they deceived knew them as Sally and Tim rather than Raynor and Moth. But of course their own relatives knew who they were, and could have gone straight to the publisher or the press. Or even said (as many would have done): "Now you're wealthy, give us back the money you stole or we'll go to the media."

It seems one of them did approach Penguin, who ignored them. So Penguin have a lot to answer for too. (Contrast this with the way that Pan Macmillan treated Kate Clanchy after some unpleasant and unevidenced accusations were made against her. Very interesting.)

@Aussiebornandbred Thank you for taking the time to post this.

She's still on the agent's website...

https://share.google/SnWlreKJ3DfHRnzgj

They could well be in it together. But she wrote the books, sent them to publishers, has spoken at numerous literary events, gone on TV… he’s always stayed in the background. It makes me wonder whether he would have preferred to keep quietly out of the limelight after they’d made a quick buck and got themselves on a better financial footing. I know once TSP became a best seller, a certain amount of publicity would be part of the deal and impossible to avoid, but even so, SW appears to have welcomed it all with open arms.

Well, I suppose an official psychiatric diagnosis would have been terribly useful in some ways, but I have a vision of a blackly comic series of psych consults in which SW is repeatedly told ‘Great news, Mrs Walker — you’re mentally sound as a bell!’ while she attempts to hold a convincing conversation with her imaginary voices…

Thr article explains thst TW's parents were left so poor that they had to move into the barn. It sounds like their true story would have been dreadful.

I'm wondering, among other things: (1) what (legitimate) income did SW and TW have latterly if the barn was not rented out (I'd understood thst their income came from letting out the barn plus TW being a gardener but that TW left his job); and (2) what became of TW's poor parents when the house and barn were repossessed?

Will these new revelations change attitudes towards them in their local community?

Some posters have suggested that although they’ve been ‘cancelled’ on a national scale, people who know them from the local shop or around the village would probably accept them and not badmouth them. But stealing from your own parents and leaving them struggling to buy food or heat their home is next level.

They are in it together.

His family say he was always inventing illnesses, so they never believed the latest one.

He told Bill Cole that doctors had told him to not plan past Christmas when Bill asked him about the work on the farm.

He was happy to be photographed in hospital as part of their Thames (?) walk deception.

The load of guff he "shared" with Jason Isaacs, taking the man in with his ongoing lies.

And on and on where he is out there publicly or privately lying about his health.

Staying in the background would not be doing any of that.

I think the stand out TimMoth contribution has been the film.

This is a non-watcher of the film commenting but, from the unavoidable trailers embedded in articles and reviews, it is Tim's selling his 'story' to Jason that helped the film. Gillian's portrayal seems odd, strangulated accent and exaggerated facial expressions, probably because SalRay did not give her anything to go on with her steeliness and guardedness.

No, it was Tim who was the gift that kept giving to Jason. And look at Moth posing at the premiere - remind anyone of the fetching wedding suit in the picture today?

I doubt they’re out and about much locally, to be honest. They live (or did when last heard of) on a large private estate and can obviously afford to have supplies etc delivered. I’m sure they have been outside the gates since the original Observer story, but I imagine it’s more a case of driving somewhere else, not being regulars down the local pub. Someone on one of these threads suggested it was an area with a lot of second homes, possibly uninhabited off-season, so easier to stay under the radar.

I really hope so. If you were naive stupid generous, you could maybe let go of the employer fraud, but her making her in-laws homeless, and stealing her mum's savings leaving her destitute aren't even next level, they're end game level.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat I’m wondering if you’re questioning the family saga aspects from an author’s point of view? All the while I was reading the books I was aware of an “us and them” situation with Moth and Ray bound up together in romantic, passionate isolation. She took a fact, removed all the truth from it and stuffed it full of something else that would pass in their favour, so we have the family estrangements and are led to believe that the faults are due to family snobbishness, resentment and dislike with no basis. The reader is clueless that the victims are actually the couple’s own family. It is all there. The way that she portrays her family in the guise of friends, the writing about her parents and sibling all makes Raynor appear to be someone who needed to escape them with good reason. Her fraudulent activity is entirely absent and yet she tests the water with the reader by telling them that she steals fudge, took a camping spot without paying for it. We know there was never any reason for this, it was sheer arrogance on her part.

I don’t believe her latest statement where she claims she’s had lots of support and letters of such. It’s the complete opposite. Yes, she continues to manipulate the dialogue despite overwhelming evidence and facts.

I don’t believe her latest statement where she claims she’s had lots of support and letters of such. It’s the complete opposite. Yes, she continues to manipulate the dialogue despite overwhelming evidence and facts.

I don't generally believe that sort of thing. If loads of people are happy to support some will do it publicly so you'll see it.

It's a bit like on here when people are being told they're very UR and then put something along the lines of "you're all meanies, and just horrid bullies. I've had loads of private messages of support who agree with me". Never believe them.

I’m horrified. It’s all so unpleasant and to think they were held up as champions of the homeless when they were never homeless a day in their lives since their relatives looked out for them. That will only fuel the vile narrative that people on the streets get in cars and go to plush houses. This is SO damaging to homeless charities.
AND! The great walk is a fiction. Presume so is everything else - from illnesses to dying sheep to tortoises. And poor Polly! Imagine reading that about yourself.

I am waiting now for Penguin to make a statement. Sally got rich by selling us lies.

Also, if true, how gut-wrenching would it be to be made destitute by your relative stealing from you - and on top of that, to have to live with said relative because of the poverty?

No, it was Tim who was the gift that kept giving to Jason. And look at Moth posing at the premiere - remind anyone of the fetching wedding suit in the picture today?

Exactly!!! He loved being centre stage. The pair of them, no one coming after them for either of their frauds, him as much a storyteller as her with his tales to Jason.

Yes, that occurred to me too, as surely the Walker parents can’t have been paying even a token rent, and that would mean there was no tourist income from letting the barn, TW was apparently too ill to work as a gardener or plasterer, and SW ‘too busy’ fronting the legal case against the men who bought the debt.

And yes, you’re right — if the Walker parents were still living in the barn at the time the property was repossessed, more than just SW and TW were being evicted, and it wasn’t just the two of them cutesily hiding under the stairs from bailiffs. Someone posted TW’s dad’s obituary from a local paper on one of these previous threads. I think it gave a local address in or near Pwllheli..?

I believe Tim's parents lived in Criccieth from at least 2012