Thread 22 : 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]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 21 IS FULL

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?

Links to threads 18-20 can be found in the OP of Thread 21: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5460943-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?

Most recent:

• 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

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 6 months we have done amazingly well together for 21 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.

After 21,000 posts there are still new things to look out for on the path ahead:

• 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, 13th January 2026
• BBC Podcast (NB Not involving Our Chloe)

Keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 21 IS FULL

Was that the Balham bookshop that featured in the documentary, where CH talked to the former PRH employee?

@SimonArmpit And, as somebody commented on here recently, what is there going to be in the way of content, sans Moth, sans wild camping, sans noodles and fudge, sans jeopardy, sans wildlife in bleak midwinter other than a few nights in B&Bs accompanied by endless navel gazing and rumination on the distant memories of building a forever home in N Wales and fears for the future for planet earth and planet Walker?

Ooh, I think that was me. Pondering on what would be left if all the contentious elements that Sal might reasonably be expected to mull over during her solo walk were taken out. She's no great shakes at the nature writing, so her observations on what she can see aren't going to make a book. Besides, the amount of editing necessary would mean that she'd likely have to go back and do the walk again this winter, and do a total rewrite. Because all her sad and lonely musing subjects are being held up to such scrutiny that there's almost nothing she can mention without someone leaping on it and saying 'that couldn't possibly have happened.'

OWH always seemed rather 'thin'. It completely contradicts the whole message of the other 3 books: I know what is best for my husband with a terminal condition - he must walk and walk.

I have assumed it was going to take readers deeper into the 'spiritual' healing of nature and so lead into the new Gigspanner tour and wellness retreat in the spring. It doesn't work for me but then it would have never mattered what people like me think.

Always remember:

Raynor knows that her husband Moth's health is declining, getting worse by the day. She knows of only one cure: the healing power of walking.

I wonder if OWH is going to consist of Sal healing herself through walking. It's the only approach I can see working now - if she steers clear of mentioning any actual issues and just talks about how the physical activity of walking helps her with her 'recent stress'. Probably with lots of self-pitying comments about being bullied and breakdowns and having to hide away from the meanies. And a bit of wildlife observation largely stolen from the appropriate guidebook.

I mean, basically, a pamphlet would cover it, never mind a book.

The article below seems to support the original poster's belief that the judgment might still be enforcrable (and am not sure why SW woukd have paid off the debt now if there were no obligation to do so):

https://lexlaw.co.uk/solicitors-london/creditors-guide-to-enforcement-of-unpaid-old-court-judgment-debts-in-the-uk-2025/

Not saying that you are wrong, only that I am thoroughly confused on the point, which seems quite complicated.

@OneThousandThreads thanks so much for reporting last night, I was so excited I can't remember if I said!

Thanks to all of you for the good wishes. The cardiac stuff the sepsis left me with is proving more challenging than anticipated to get under control but I've got great support and it could all have been very much worse.

I think Our Chloe has shown total and ethical professionalism (as well as tenacity) and the offer to confidentially verify information about Moth's health, countered by the nonsensical 'documentary' thing was more than fair. If genuine, they had the chance of making at least one problematic strand of this go away and I think it's pretty obvious that they didn't because they can't.

I wonder whether SW' got a working mobile phone for her latest long-distance solo walk in the dangerous wilds in winter. It would be lovely to see some photos of the stunning scenery..

I'm at the stage where I don't know which is worse, Them actually making a documentary over what seem to be entirely false claims of Moth's 'return to health' (although it might have leaned more towards other aspects of living with illness, I suppose we can't know) or the claims of making said documentary just to stall awkward questions.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat WRT people saying Tim and Moth were nice people - well of course there will be people who like them!

Bill Coles for example.

It seems a bit of a stretch to put it mildly. Apparently she only walked the C2C for around 10 days and was forced to abort it early because of bad weather! The May 2025 neurologist's letter alludes to Moth having cardiac issues (unrelated to CBS apparently), which may have prevented him participating in Sal's 10 day C2C jaunt, which the cynic in me sees as a way of shoe horning a bit of walking into a book Sal was contracted to write for PRH with a fortnight in Feb 2025 being the only window of opportunity she could squeeze it into before the Salt Path film commitments filled up her appointments diary. As you say a pamphlet would probably cover it.

And the sad fact is, that although Sal would very much like to think that she is in the same league as nature writers like Robert Macfarlane, she simply isn't. Maybe that doesn't matter to PRH - after all TSP outsold Robert Macfarlane's Underland by a factor of ten!

Lovely Robert McFarlane is a little bit more literary in his approach to nature than Sal's basic '*here's a gorse bush, it smells like coconut and has yellow flowers'. Unfortunately a huge chunk of the public doesn't want literary, they want to read stuff that they don't have to concentrate on or think deeply about. Which, I think, is why she outsold him.

*Not an actual extract, because I can't bring myself to type those.

I think I raised a similar notion a few threads ago too. I struggled to see how a 2 week C2C walk could merit an entire book, even with whatever "memoir' material she could crowbar in...it seems like a chapter at best but more the sort of thing one would expect to be enough for a magazine feature. It really is curious to think about what vacuous nonsense she must have written to fill the pages, and now what changes she has had to make. Given her penchant for fiddling timelines, can we now expect a woe is me walk whereby the C2C is her dealing with the vitriol and all the meanies to "guide us on the truth", while Tim has rapidly deteriorated due to the stress?

Jason Isaacs must be hurting

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I very much fear this will be the case. Lots of solitary staring into the distance and describing the horizon and linking two sad little twisted trees to herself and Tim and their increasing closeness due to the bleak conditions they are forced to live under (because of the meanies).

Snap! I just read this after posting and you pretty much say the same thing!

We are great minds, thinking alike.

She's in no way close to being a 20th as good a nature/travel/walking writer as Our Simon and he's primarily a poet! Without the Tale of Woe underpinning the narrative (increasingly thinly and tenuously in the later books) she has very little to offer as a writer. That first page of HNTDDD is seared on to my brain and not in a good way.

Headless Simon would nod in agreement if, well, you know.

Yes, that would be one approach. Maybe, as you say, the one possible approach.

I think I assumed back when I was first thinking about it that OWH had originally been going to be SW solo-walking in sober meditation about how TW was definitely, actually dying this time, honest, and how, despite it sounding counter-intuitive, she was going to have to leave him at home and walk alone, in winter, as a way of getting used to the solitary winter of what her life would be like without him by her side, gathering strength before rushing home to tend him through his last days. A sort of pre-emptive meditation on widowhood.

(Which would probably be potentially moving, if you didn't mind clunky prose or have an actual grasp on the Walkers as scammers.)

Hard to know how it will have been rejigged, if/when it appears.

I'm assuming someone at PRH will have an Observer subscription to listen to the full podcast at one go, to see what new stuff is being alleged.

Part of the problem with what OWH might be is that SW has no real interest in nature, as far as I can tell, for all her protestations about wild salty vistas and peregrines.

She does a fairly sanitised feelgood pathetic fallacy/nature as redemptive shtick, designed to appeal to people who live in suburbs and watch Escape to the Country (I'm not denigrating them, incidentally, but just saying that's a lot of her market).

If you compare TSP or its sequels to something like James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life, it's way less challenging of the reader and far more feelgood.

TSL starts off aggressively challenging its reader's assumptions about the Lake District as a leisure/tourist/Lake poet space of natural beauty with an opening about him and his 'written off as dumb' schoolmates smashing up the science lab and farting at a school assembly that mentioned Wordsworth, and focuses on it as a working landscape. It's a much less feelgood warm and fuzzy book than any of SW's productions.

I think this is part of the reason of Sal's success. She plays in to the Middle England perception of the countryside as slightly threatening, slightly unpredictable but essentially wild untamed gorgeousness filled with cheeping and baaing. Not as someone's workplace; a potentially dangerous place where people are clawing a living essentially shovelling shit.

Because people whose only exposure to The Countryside is weekends away in cosy cottages or going for a picturesque drive, don't want to hear about death and poverty and a workforce who can't afford to put the heating on. They want dashing long-haired Australian lifeguards and salt-of-the-earth locals with incomprehensible accents and lots of acquired wisdom.

Well yes to all of the above. But it is still going to have to culminate in Sal saving Tim. Because the alternative hasn't happened and doesn't seem imminent. And I'm very happy for them about that.

It is all pointless unless her deep communion with the wind - she is in fact the wind - and her unique appreciation of their closeness to nature doesn't heal him.

I can only vaguely remember but was there mention recently about how long they had stayed at Polly's?

I think someone said above, 18 months. Then 6 months at deceased mother's cottage.

Eta - if so it fills 2 years from eviction in July 2013 to "diagnosis" in June 2015, followed by some walking (re: Fat Apples Australians) and commencement of Tim's degree.

Maybe she will have discovered that nature can heal him at a distance if she leans very hard into the wind and stares at gorse and emotes emotively?

Or maybe she will encounter a shaman on the Coast to Coast path who can hold Moth's special bandana, which SW will have brought with her on the walk, and send him healing vibes remotely? A bit like the angel meditation lady in Glastonbury, but without Moth then having to spend a fortnight recovering from lying down.

I once read somewhere that when the scriptwriters for Grey's Anatomy were writing an episode, they indicated gaps by just writing 'MEDICAL MEDICAL' so that specialist medically qualified consultants would know where to insert bits of appropriate language to do with whatever the medical element of that episode plotline was.

I often vaguely imagine SW mentally inserting 'NATURE FILLER NATURE FILLER' into her MS.

I said 18 months at 'Polly' 's, which I'm pretty sure is right, but I can't remember if it was stated in CH's December Observer story, or actually said by SW's niece in the documentary.