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

@IvyGoldenM AND! The great walk is a fiction.

Yes, Anne says that they stayed for close to 18 months : This covers much of the period the couple claimed to be destitute and camping on the coastal path.

The above feels like a vindication of us all pooling our observations.

So bad that Penguin misled about nobody raising it with them before when Anne had contacted them.

Different things trigger different people and the hearing voices and hallucinations does it for me. I've known quite a few people who have been through psychosis and they're better human beings than MrsWW could ever imagine.

To attempt an answer as to why so long, I think it boils down to at least 3 key things.

1.Disparate people/victims/witnessess who are unaware that the same crime happened to others, therefore lone small voices and fearful to stand above the parapet (think of other, albeit very different scandals...Post Office, or Harvey Weinstein, or Jimmy Saville.) All took years to be exposed and only when victims realised they were one among many. Add to this the family loyalty towards the elderly victims who never wished to press charges, likely due to believing Tim was dying.

2.A lack of places to turn for those people mentioned above. "Who do I tell and what evidence do I have?". Anne clearly tried by telling Penguin but nothing happened. If they won't listen then who will?

3.An excellent journalist willing to look beneath the surface after one of those small voices tipped them off, and then proceeding to find other voices, convincing them to come forward, and joining forces to corroborate and support each other to expose the lies, fraud and theft.

All of this takes time.

Well, perhaps some of those who dismissed the original fraud as unimportant because "it's about the story and the walk" may reconsider in light of "the walk" being a series of camping holidays while based in a comfortable flat.

There are a lot of hurting people out there because of Mr and MrsWW. It's the betrayal as much as the money. How awful for Salray's mother to die with this on her mind. Mrs Hemmings might wonder if she could have been spared this pain if the family victims had gone for prosecution. Yet it's understandable that they didn't want to take their own relative to court and probably just wanted it over and done with quietly.

Reading these revelations makes me wonder if, at some level, SalRay and Mothtim knew this might surface and that's why they're renting instead of buying. Much easier to do a moonlight flit and disappear after giving the landlord notice than deal with the process of selling.

My head is still spinning!
Where do the son and daughter fit in all this?
It was (supposedly) the daughter who read Ray’s manuscript, written so that Moth would not lose his memories of tender moments ( salted blackberries) on the path and said it should be sent to a publisher

I gather from the article that the men who had taken over the loan/private mortgage made to the Walkers by the uncle managed to trace them after Chloe’s expose and that the Walkers paid them back.

My questions are:
Why pay something back you have said you don’t owe? The whole court case in TSP is about this injustice and their innocence. They owed nothing according to the author.

if you have the piece of paper evidence that proves you owe nothing, why pay it now?
(It’s very Andrew M- W )

Did the men they owed the money to threaten legal action now they now knew the Walkers’ new identities? Legal action which revealed the truth in a court of law would not be a good look for professional victim Sally.

I know we, quite rightly, only mention them when we have to but I would have thought that both sets of parents would have been thinking of Sally and Tim's two children. This is probably a huge thing where they would have wanted to protect their grandchildren.

I don't think they are even mentioned in today's article so The Observer have also avoided mentioning them. There are issues here now because they are in their mid-thirties and are beneficiaries in a business venture with their parents. The daughter has helped with sending out the Gigspanner books and set up the (doomed, thank goodness) wellness website. The son benefited from the Rome holiday when they were supposed to be in dire straits and knows he ferried them around when they were supposed to be walking.

Reading these revelations makes me wonder if, at some level, SalRay and Mothtim knew this might surface and that's why they're renting instead of buying. Much easier to do a moonlight flit and disappear after giving the landlord notice than deal with the process of selling.

Yes, and I wonder if their considerable £££ is in a mountainous European country famous for cuckoo clocks, or somewhere equally offshore?

The 'pure child of nature' pose makes it all seem even more grimy. Also, surely someone with a compulsion to steal caused by a genuine disorder wouldn't confine it to the times when they wanted/needed/felt entitled to large sums of money (or fudge bars)? It seems that people usually take random stuff, rather than embezzling their parents bank accounts

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/kleptomania/symptoms-causes/syc-20364732

Being a greedy grifter is not a MH issue.

I think that story is quite a fiction itself and the book was carefully crafted. It’s clear The Salt Path has been a long time in the making. There have been several
incarnations of the book, from HNTDDD to Lightly Salted Blackberries. It was a cynical exercise to tug heartstrings and make
money.

Absolutely. And this story says that TW’s family contacted CH immediately after the first Observer story with the claim that SW stole a large sum of money from TW’s parents, but that there was no documentary evidence of this at the time, the couple had since died, and there was no supporting paperwork.

It wasn’t until SW’s niece gave CH the handwritten letter to SW’s mother and the typed ‘confession’, which she’d been handed by her own mother, SW’s sister, before her dead in 2024, that there was evidence CH could use to corroborate the claim.

That was the first thing that occured to me when I read the Observer article this morning - that Tim's poor parents would also have been caught up in the eviction and wonder where they went if they had no money to cover rentals.

I assume that the reason for the eviction was that they hadn't been able to keep up with their monthly loan and mortgage payments for some time - so they would have effectively been living 'free' on the farm for a few years before the legal process started as this takes some time - they wouldn't have just been kicked out of the house within a few days of the court case as Sal has portrayed.

Also - if Sal was already an out of control kleptomaniac at the time of the Hemmings/family embezzelment I've also wondered who else she would have stolen form. The 'redundancy' from the Abersoch hotel always seemed to be a bit of a convenient excuse.

I'm looking forward to the documentary tomorrow night as I've been following these threads from the start and can't believe what's come out in the Observer today - this is much worse than I imagined. It would be great if there were appearances by Bill Cole, Gigspanner, Gillian Anderson, Dave & Julie, and others caught up in this debacle.

I also hope that following the documentary this scandal is covered on the National TV news/The One Show/This Morning etc to bring it to the wider attention of those adoring fans so that they can see what workshy, lying grifters they really are.

You make good points - they may well have salted (ha!) a lot of dosh in unreachable accounts. Criminals often do that when they forward plan. There have been other bizarre couples in history who have worked together in deceptions and there's usually a dominant one. Often there are delusions but not sure what that means with the WalkerWinns - SalRay displays huge superiority in that she's not like the little people who go out and work, oh no, she deserves everything now with no effort and will lie and cheat to get it. For all this 'child of nature who loves animals and the land', she's highly materialistic. Her husband is too.

Today's Observer article clears up a lot of the mystery but I think there are still a lot of questions that remain unanswered. Perhaps they will be addressed in the Sky documentary and any other follow up articles/podcasts.

Specifically:

• why did Sal leave her job at the White House Hotel, Abersoch and was she involved in any criminality while working there?

• why did Tim suddenly leave his job at Plas-yn-Rhiw?

• what did Sal spend all the money on that she stole and embezzled?

• was there ever any business investment with Cooper?

• is there definitive proof that Sal wrote HNTDDD? if so, what has been the reaction of the CB Prize organisers?

• had they planned the walks on the SWCP for some time before their house was repossessed? Could the fact that their son was based in Newquay have played a role?

• When was the photo of Raymoth at the SWCP monument at South haven Point, Poole taken and why are they wearing clothes that do not figure in any other photos as well as looking considerably younger than photos that were taken on the walk in 2013?

• were they just surviving on £30-48pw WTC or was Moth getting some form of much more generous disability allowance?

• what sections of the SWCP did they actually walk in 2013/14? What sections did they walk in 2015 (FAC)? Did they also walk sections in 2016 before Moth returned to Plymouth Uni and Sal started writing TSP in September 2016?

• did the angel experience in Glastonbury and the Old Etonian beggar with the skateboard really take place as described?

• were they constantly shunned by people they met for being homeless and regularly described as tramps?

• how many of the encounters with the homeless actually occurred? did they go to a soup kitchen in Newquay as described in TSP or just hang out with their son?

• did the incident with Grant happen as described in TSP? Did the incidents of mistaken identity with SA really happen?

• what role did Moth's margin comments in PD's guide to the SWCP play in the writing of TSP?

• did the incident at The Minack Theatre with the cast of Iolanthe happen as described in TSP?

• did Raymoth bump into D&J by chance in July 2014 or did this incident occur much later? Were they already known to each other and arranged to meet up and walk a stretch of the SWCP together?

• did the walk finish up in Polruan as described or was the entire Polruan finish in Sept 2013/Sept 2014 invented for narrative purposes?

• was there ever anybody in Polruan walking a tortoise called Lettuce at Lantic Bay or an old man with glaucoma who saw the returning peregrine?

• did the incident with Anna at Talland Bay really take place?

• When did Raymoth start living in Polruan?

• what, if any role, did their son Tristan play while they were on the walk. As well as ferrying them from LE to Bristol, how else was he involved?

• when did Sal start writing TSP? Was the letter to the BI part of a strategic marketing campaign cooked up with her agent?

• did Raymoth ever ask to have a 2nd opinion about Moth's CBS diagnosis? if not, why not? To what degree was the original CBS diagnosis deliberately engineered by Raymoth?

• how much did Sal's agent and PRH know about the true story of TSP?

@NaughtyNoodler also, was there anything behind the quick flit from the Midlands to Wales?

I'm astounded at the cruelty SalRay perpetrated towards her mother and her in-laws. On the psychological front I have a long-held theory that, generally, those who have cruel parents are very unlikely to ill-treat them because we are always looking for love and approval. Our mother was an abuser and my siblings and I didn't so much as steal a fiver from her handbag, though arguably, she deserved it. Yet here we have parents who it seems did their best and were royally ripped off by their daughter/daughter-in-law.

Of course we don't know everything about Salray's childhood and she said her parents were disappointed she didn't take up with a wealthy landowner and didn't approve of Moth and she sounds like an isolated child, but that doesn't justify any of her theft. Perhaps now we will get a story of the terrible abuse she went through with her family.

So many more questions to be answered, I'm unavoidable busy today, torn between reading and getting on, you are all posting such interesting posts, I'm just going to have to keep running along trying to catch up with you all :)

@NaughtyNoodler - in addition to your thorough list, I think that as well as - Anne says that they stayed for close to 18 months : This covers much of the period the couple claimed to be destitute and camping on the coastal path.

Another relative added: They did walking holidays like most people do.

Also that Chloe met Anne at a motorway service station in the west of England.

NaughtyNoodler - when it comes to the questions in your list relating to the events in the book, I think we can reasonably conclude that they were all either greatly exaggerated or entirely made up.

Wow. Just read the Observer piece. It’s all looking far worse than I could have imagined. Emptying your mother’s bank account? Stealing from your in-laws? Lying about the state of the niece’s rent free flat? All on top of the long, slow embezzlement from her employer.

I wouldn’t believe a single word from that memoir now. And there was something in the article about a relative trying to contact Penguin early on and being fobbed off. Penguin not coming out of this looking good.

Oh, and nothing paid back, even though the couple have millions now.

Thanks to whoever put the Observer article up here - their site wouldn’t let me log in this morning. Going to read others’ comments now…

Interesting piece on substack this morning by a writer named Lily Dunn. I like her use of guru - I think that that was always what Salray aspired to be.

lilydunn.substack.com/p/the-salt-path-saga-continues-what

It’s a bit more difficult to pull it off as a double act, isn’t it? ‘

I stole from my elderly mother because I half-consciously wanted to punish her for never understanding me or approving of my blond, free-spirited eco-warrior husband’’ is one thing, but adding ‘I also stole from my PILs because they never approved of me and/or were not that nice to my blond, free-spirited eco-warrior husband in childhood and/or wanted him to hold down a plastering job, like other people!’ begins to feel like a pudding is being thoroughly over-egged.

I wonder if Chloe got a copy of HNTDDD from one of the family members so was able to say with confidence, as she does in the article, that Salray is Izzy Winn- Thomas?

Thanks for sharing this really insightful piece.

I'm in shock..it's worse than I ever thought!

Their lies and thefts have caused so much hurt and damage to good people and their family actually helped them only to be criticised in the book...like poor Bill Cole.

What I really don't understand is having made millions why they didn't try to pay everything back with interest, beg for forgiveness, try to repair the damage. But no...just more denial and deflecting. No morals at all...