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

And of my Mum!

It was farting about, in our household :)

Have said this before on previous threads but the Walton Centre in Liverpool is where I assume they went - it's a top class neurological centre that takes referrals from all over. A relative of mine was treated there who didn't live locally as they had a rare neurological problem (a real one). For once, I can't blame the WinnWalkers for wanting to stick with the consultant there (though TSP is characteristically mean and grudging in describing him)

See, I have no issue whatsoever with the mother's death being removed from TSP and inserted into TWS, though I wouldn't have pretended it was happening in the 'now' of the timeline, I'd have done it as flashbacks. Though I suppose there was no 'now' of TSW's timeline, given that it purports to carry straight on from the end of TSP, but doesn't, and none of the approximate dates given bear any resemblance to actual events we have dates for eg the Icelandic walk appearing to have happened at an entirely different time period.

I have no issue at all with SW's sister not being mentioned at their mother's deathbed, but I would have assumed, all other things being equal, that she was omitted because she'd asked to be, which isn't unusual in memoirs. A friend's memoir about a year spent living somewhere unusual gives the impression she's a single parent to a young child, because her teenager and DH didn't want to be in it, and she respected that. I visited her at one point and was with her during one of the more dramatic interludes, but asked to be left out, too.

But given what we know about SW as compulsive liar, fantasist and thief from family, it's perfectly possible that she's deleted her sister because her sister's presence just called up too much difficult real-life stuff, about family 'rifts' and the reasons for them etc etc.

Though obviously it's not entirely clear where SW's sister sat in the 'rift'. Obviously discovering your sister had stolen your elderly mother's entire savings would be a fairly understandable reason for not being on good terms, and the typed confession appears to have been addressed to her, but her daughter was the one who gave the Walkers a free place to stay for eighteen months... ?

If the Walkers moved to Sally’s mum’s house in Jan / Feb 2016 and Mother began his course in Sept 2015, what happened to Moth’s studies?

Sorry. That should say Moth.

@OnlyAfterwards See, I have no issue whatsoever with the mother's death being removed from TSP and inserted into TWS, though I wouldn't have pretended it was happening in the 'now' of the timeline, I'd have done it as flashbacks. Though I suppose there was no 'now' of TSW's timeline, given that it purports to carry straight on from the end of TSP, but doesn't, and none of the approximate dates given bear any resemblance to actual events we have dates for eg the Icelandic walk appearing to have happened at an entirely different time period.

This is how Penguin tell us about TWS:

Moth has a terminal diagnosis, but against all medical odds, he seems revitalised in nature. Together on the wild coastal path, with their feet firmly rooted outdoors, they discover that anything is possible.

Mrs Winn's death is still in TSP - it is used to flag up the choking horror.

Mrs Winn's death is in TWS - it is just as Tim starts a new term, but he hasn't even started his course yet.

Indeed Salray's fictional consultation is in no way, how the real one went in 2015, I don't understand why she wanted to portray the consultant in such a poor light, other than to make a future case of, bad consultant, he is responsible for my believing Moth was dying. This is not the reality of what we see in the 2015 letter, reflecting the real consultation.

I have a feeling that @AllFrothNoMoth is correct, in speculating that the missing 2019, second page, could have revealed that they told the consultant about the book, this is speculation. It does make sense, they told him about the film at the 2025 consultation, which was online, so they only travelled twice to physically see him. We have no evidence of Tim being seen more frequently by the Walton unit, the consultant makes no reference to that.

Apologies for the timeline queries. I’ve just read the early part of TWS and it is saying that Sally’s mum is dying in the first weeks of Moth’s second term (semester?) in the January. I’m getting mixed up with when the course actually started and when they say it did.

She has fiddled the timelines. In TSP the walk was supposed to have happened from Aug-Oct 2013 followed by a 9 month break before they walked from Poole to Polruan between July and Sept 2014. Moth is supposed to have started at Plymouth Uni in Sept 2014. However, we now know that they stayed at Polly's from sept 2013 - Jan 2015 and at Sal's mother's house from Jan-June 2015 and Moth didn't start his studies until Sept 2015, completing the degree course in summer 2018.

The article (below) from July 2016 about Moth and fellow students on the course winning a garden design prize at RHS Hampton Court where they are described as first year students on the course at Plymouth Uni, is the definitive evidence.

Cornish garden designed at Eden appears at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show

Thank you. I haven’t got there yet in my reading journey, but in their own terms what happens to Moth and his course while Sally is revisiting her past in Staffs with her mum in hospital? Does he cope ok?

SW's mother died in January 2015 but Moth didn't start the degree course until the autumn after. It has been debated in the past that he may have done some type of course in the missing year to prepare for Uni but there is no way of telling this and since we have now been told that they were at 'Pollys' for 18 months and another 6 months at her Mum's cottage, he couldn't have done this in Cornwall.
If Moth was with SW and her sister was also there at her Mum's bedside, it does make a mockery of the whole angst of the first part of TWS (as if the death of a parent doesn't make an upsetting enough situation)

Sorry, I should have been more precise. I was not referring to reality, I was wondering how, in TWS, Moth coped with Sally’s absence while she was away at her mum’s house. I haven’t read it yet.

Not sure whether we've discussed the question of how Moth copes in Sal's absence, when she is off on Gigspanner tours/Litfest events or walking the C2C.

Moth is meant to be an extremely ill man, yet he seems to be left on his own for periods at a time. I seem to remember one (now deleted) of Sal's IG feeds which showed Moth at their kitchen table with a pile of batch cooked meals which had been prepared for him in her absence. Not sure whether it was just before Sal disappeared off on her C2C walk in Feb 2025, but it does suggest that Moth wouldn't have been exactly starving in her absence!

Moth was in touch by phone and there is quite a bit about how hw was coping (or not) without her and about why he couldn't be there because her mum didn't like him etc.

Remember he also points out in TWS that they’re not going to want to stock the agricultural land of the cider farm (which, one of us established, was in fact rented or sold separately to the cider orchards so it was never the Walters’s responsibility anyway), not because he’s seriously ill and near death, but because ‘I need the freedom to do other things too’ He doesn’t want to be tied to the farm by livestock because he wants to be able to go with SW to her literary events.

Immediately afterwards, there’s a reference to his ‘invitations to speak at events were coming thick and fast’ and to long queues of people waiting further her to sign their book, and to her time being ‘spread paper thin’. No references to whether she’s afraid Moth has taken a turn for the worse at home, or fallen in the orchard, despite the fact that two chapters earlier he’s sleeping twelve hours a night, struggling to move in the mornings, and losing weight fast. Not that this has stopped them starting to pay rent for a filthy, damp, rodent-infested farmhouse that takes months of work to make habitable— another odd decision for a dying man to make.

This has never made sense to me. I gave up work what 6 years ago now, a little before Covid hit, because DH's mobility was deteriorating fast and he was falling regularly, also couldn't safely make a cup of tea or microwave a meal. We had an alarm pendant etc but I knew I took the risk of becoming as unsafe at work as he was at home because of the constant worry. The idea of taking off on tour with a band and leaving him would have been ludicrous (well, the idea of me with a band is fairly ludicrous to start with)

Either Timoth was never as unwell as she made out or her regard for his safety was very much lacking or, I suppose, they could have had live in care, but in which case, why the prepared meals? My inclination is to think the first possibility was the case.

I have always found it particularly disturbing that the lies of the diagnosis, and that it was 10 years ago, are reiterated within her Grief Channel interview. This is specifically for those coming to terms with a loved ones death. It is, from what I hear, the story in TWS of the death with Raynor alone with her mother. Not the 2013 death in TSP. Mrs Winn's death is from 14 mins:

You cannot tell what is happening from the accounts as they only contain a balance sheet at the year end date rather than an income statement.

I want to thank everyone for their excellent suggestions re a book, @Vroomfondleswaistcoat I am sure I am an expert on historical podiatry having had a bad verruca when I was about 10. I'm relying on Ghostly Charles to provide the twinkly charm from his roost in various trees, as DH is unlikely to cooperate, certainly not to the extent of wearing a neckerchief.

It occurs that I could crack on with the book now, without leaving the house. I know quite a lot of the places mentioned, could gen up on the rest and insert a lot of "hello birds hello sky" 'nature writing' and philosophical musings about footsoreness quite easily.

Salray, I take your blind guy doing yoga and raise you a spectral Stuart monarch.

Or that spousal illnesses exaggerated for dramatic purposes will never in fact get in the way of the promotion of the book whose hardluck storyline they were exaggerated to fuel?

Wasn’t TW’s illness also given as the reason the publication of TWS was pushed back by several months? When in fact it seems to have been that SW struggled to write it and was late with the MS? Or possibly that the MS needed a lot of work after submission.

TW’s illness basically occurs when needed for dramatic urgency, but doesn’t impact book tours, Gigspanner tours, or 1000 mile walks needed for a book project.

Thank you for that. We were discussing if Tim can be accountable for paying back his student loan as they are multi-millionaires.

Confidence tricksters are invariably seen as nice when they are getting the money.

Maybe a bit premature to discuss the C2C walk but insofar as Sal ( and PRH) might have been plotting to join a bandwagon shortly about to depart, the FT article below might be worth a look.

www.ft.com/content/ca89128b-0ee7-4bb9-bff5-65f19898b388

Thank you for the details about the timeline. I would add, however, that we don't know he completed his degree.