Thread 21 : To feel disappointed - and now disgusted too - after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

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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?

Thread 20: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5454438-thread-20-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 5 months we have done amazingly well together for 20 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. Our Cardboard Mascot Our Simon has had his head stuck back on and is wearing a very fetching tinsel boa. The charabanc is bedecked with fairy lights and very well stocked up. May the seasonal fudge and mulled cider be with you one and all. 🎅🌲🎁❄️🎄

These threads are the gifts that keep on giving:
New:

• Salt Path: A Very British Scandal, available from Monday 15th December Sky Documentaries and NOW TV
• ‘Don’t look for the money. I’ve taken it all’: Salt Path author Raynor Winn’s ‘confession’ that she stole from her family | The Observer

Up and coming:

• 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
• Podcast series from The Observer's award-winning Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou
• BBC Documentary (NB Not involving Our Chloe)

*MNHQ correcting above 'Documentary' to 'Podcast' at request of author

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 20 IS FULL

Sally and Tim should form a club with Michelle Mone, Belle Gibson and Sir Tom’s daughter; the guild of the swindlers and grifters association. Perhaps Jeffrey Archer can be honorary president. All members must wear cravats and hair gel.

Can anyone tell me whether the documentary is going to be on Sky Documentaries again. The last I can see it was screened on December 17 at 6.30am UK time. It’s nearly 8.00am on the 18th in the UK. I am at the house of a friend who has access to Sky Documentaries and am desperate to see it

I have looked online and it appears it will be on at 9.00pm on December 19 in the UK. Have I got that correct ?
That means it will be on here on Saturday 20th at 7.00am. I might be able to manage that🤞🤞🤞🤞🤞

"The only potential lie". I think Annabel Souter could do with reading these threads from the beginning to get a full grasp of reality. How people can be so blinkered is beyond me.

I can't remember how Sky Docs works but with Now TV it is available all the time once 'up'. Could you do a search for it? Hopefully someone with more of a clue will be able to help.

Coming back in...

I'm another Dr Ruth Galloway girl here! Just finished reading the entire series IN ORDER. Delighted to hear a TV series might be in the offing!

WRT standing up hair. My hair (very short, grade 2 at the sides, cut in on top) lies flat until about three weeks after the haircut, when the natural waves growing back in (which I have it cut short to remove) make it start to go upwards. After about six weeks I have a total bouffant look.

And those photos look like actual wedding ones, not 'family party'. Sal's dad has just taken his jacket and tie off in the informal one. She's got her bouquet there and they're cutting the cake - I don't think they would have gone to all the trouble of having a new bouquet made for a family party. Those are the actual wedding, with at least her parents (plus whoever took the photo) in attendance. They no more ran away to get married with their clothes in a rucksack than I did!

This is an interesting, emotional, take on the 'story':

Bing Videos

But someone on here found the record of their marriage on Skye, or so I thought?

“If people enjoyed the book, why not let them be, you may say.” But it’s “galling” to see somebody painting themselves as the victim “when they face claims that they have created quite a few victims of their own”.
Carol Midgley, The Times

It will be shown again at 21.00 on Friday 19/12 but is also available now for download to the Sky box. My access to Sky Documentaries requires my PIN but it’s free with my very basic package.

I would assume it’s a small reception at the parents’ home, more to salve her mother’s shame at the earlier prospect of them “living in sin”. I suppose most creases can be ironed out! Sally’s hair is quite natural, though lighter in colour than some earlier family pictures, no complicated “up-do” style.

I wonder if Cecille’s father is Tim’s brother living in France. The older woman, whose name was changed to “Fiona” for privacy, must be Tim’s generation.

The airy-fairy, lazy dreamer types don’t appeal to me at all, but SW clearly worshipped him as a teenager and it takes something special for a couple to still be so adoring 40 years on, but I don’t really get what drew him to her? And how did they afford to buy a house when she was 20, even a run-down cottage in a rural midlands village in 1986 would have needed a mortgage, surely? My ex and I paid around £45k for a Victorian terraced cottage in Hampshire that year, we’d both worked full time and had a small profit from selling his flat, but the WWs hardly seem committed savers, nor would they have had much employment history for a mortgage.

perhaps they had a Registry Office wedding in Scotland and then a church wedding back in Staffordshire?

I'm still thinking "buffet at home on return" but that's a very good point about the bouquet @Vroomfondleswaistcoat . Agree with everyone saying those clothes were no way stuffed into rucksacks for the elopement. Thanks @YourWinter for the additional shots.

Delighted to hear about a possible Dr RG TV series! No idea of casting for her but I think lovely Luke Evans would be a good Nelson.

I envy people who look good with very short hair. I've got a large head and currently look like a WW1 General.

@YourWinter And how did they afford to buy a house when she was 20, even a run-down cottage in a rural midlands village in 1986 would have needed a mortgage, surely?

I know it is probably too long ago to know what happened with the hotel in Abersoch that went bankrupt, when Sally was bookkeeper. Even further back was her first job - where she was a Court clerk, which involved receiving the payment for fines incurred. Ideal.

Or the registry office in Scotland wedding was attended by her fully-approving parents and maybe one or two other relatives? With a buffet reception in a nearby hotel or guest house?

That’s a good thought. But SW wouldn’t mention it because it’s not cool and windswept and underdoggish, compared to the Folie à Deux of cramming your wedding clothes into rucksacks and sneaking off to Skye.😀

Yes, that is fact. So either they simply got married on a spur of the moment while holidaying on Skye and subsequently had a full bells and whistles party/reception back home, or Skye was well planned and families were in attendance. I lean more towards the former.

Yes, or that, too.

Though probably difficult for her dad to leave the farm. I know he was a stockman rather than a tenant farmer, but the agricultural sector aren’t known for their ability to skip off on holiday a lot…

At any rate, it’s evidence of another needless untruth pushing the ‘Moth and me against the world, romantic and unworldly, in our own blissful wild bubble, cramming our wedding clothes into rucksacks to elope in the face of family opposition’.

I do remember noticing the absence of any reference to friends, other than ‘Jan’, ‘Polly’ (and Dave and Julie) in TSP but thinking it suggested they were dropped by people when they became homeless. Whereas it seems possible that there are good reasons why they don’t have any, as well as there being very good reasons for family rifts.

ETA I keep staring at TW’s suit in those photos. In part because it’s one of the relatively few instances where a photo corroborates something SW claims, but also because it’s so shinily horrifying! It looks positively radioactive.

And then they had two kids! Sal subsequently gave up her job in courthouse finance dept, then they sold up their terraced house in Dunstall, bought a rundown farmhouse in Wales and somehow TW allegedly lost a significant amount of their capital in a bad investment (as described in confession letter in doc/observer). My question is how did they have capital to invest? When Sal wrote that in her letter, could it really be the investment in the French property that didn't pan out? Or was it a roundabout hoodwinky way of saying "we had a charge put on our house to keep me out of prison" which could be twisted as using capital for an investment. Or was the investment simply a lie to try to paint themselves as victims and afford an explanation for the thefts. The investment seems to be quite vague from what has been revealed in the letter and you'd think she'd say it involved Tim's relative if it did. It's all a bit nonsensical.

[ETA] or was the investment just the money Tim put into renovating the barn. Maybe Sal never wanted to restore the barn and was resented the fact Tim ploughed all their money into it? Just another possibility.

Trying to evaluate the truth of any particular element of TSP is very laborious and likely to be inconclusilve.

An alternative, and less exhausting, approach might be just to have a working assumption that everything in TSP is fictitious unless it's established otherwise. (For example, it has been established that someone fed them lasagne and let them stay overnight, that they stayed in a campsite and got spoken to, that they met an Australian couple in a cafe and had a conversation, and that they were married in Skye.)

I thought we'd established that you can't really get married on the spur of the moment because you have to give notice? And they took their wedding gear with them, so they obviously went to Scotland with the intention of marrying.

They married in 1986 I think? So Sal was 24, hardly a total 'ingenue'.

@SlightlyFeckless I do remember noticing the absence of any reference to friends, other than ‘Jan’, ‘Polly’ (and Dave and Julie) in TSP but thinking it suggested they were dropped by people when they became homeless. Whereas it seems possible that there are good reasons why they don’t have any, as well as there being very good reasons for family rifts.

Yes, we knew that Jan is Tim's sister and now know that Polly is Sal's niece.

The only person, I have ever noticed, that Sally has any approval for (outside of the two of them) is Julie.

She is described supportively - despite being yet another devourer of a massive breakfast - she is: smilingly content to let the big-hearted man talk on.

I wonder if Sally is telling us more, as she often can't resist doing so, and she has known Julie a long time:

We washed our hands in the hot water, smothering our sunburn in fantastic-smelling hand cream, as if we were old friends who’d known each other all our lives.

I didn't know that had been established. Also, how do we know they had wedding gear with them...we only have Sal's word for that.

Climbing back aboard the charabanc after many threads' absence. Hoo boy indeed, these new revelations were worth waiting for! So much to think about - my head was buzzing last night despite really needing to sleep, having a stinking cold. The fascination for me is trying to get inside SalTim's heads to understand why they did what they did, as it's all so far beyond the bounds of what I, and all of us, could do. Like others I'm beginning to expect personality disorders.
Will be buying a one month subscription to NowTV for a festive family viewing, worth £9.99 I think!
Also, I was interested to learn that Grant is actually Warren 'Evans the beds'. A long time ago I bought a very nice bed and then a tallboy from them. Their invoices came in envelopes made of dried elephant poo.

I don't think it could have been a complete spur of the moment thing. There are two aspects that require some degree of planning. Firstly back then the couple had to give 14 days notice to the registrar. So they couldn't literally walk in and get married. But they could have given notice on arrival in Scotland and got married a fortnight later.
Secondly the couple are required to produce their birth certificates or if they are not available explain why and make a declaration of their content. So they would have either had to take their BCs with them or come up with a satisfactory reason why they didn't have them. The latter seems most likely in the circumstances, maybe one of the first times they colluded in constructing a story to satisfy the authorities. Maybe 'we're on holiday and in love and can't bear to wait any longer' is enough, I don't know. Given what we know, it seems unlikely they would miss the chance to come up with a rather more baroque version of the truth.

I thought someone upthread said you needed to give fifteen days notice to a registry office? Ah well, doesn't really matter does it, as you say, we've only got Sal's word for any of this. The only thing we know for definite is that they married in Scotland and that's because someone turned out the records. To be honest, if Sal told me it was raining I'd want to go outside to check. She's not exactly been 'unflinchingly honest' in any of her recollections, has she?