We can argue the toss about whether CH's Observer expose boosted sales of TSP or not, but what is pretty clear after the last 7 months of intrepid sleuthing here on MN and elsewhere, is that TSP is basically, to coin a sordid colloquialism, a load of old cobblers bookended between a couple of hard(ish facts) which constitute the beginning and end of the book.
June 2013 - the Walkers did indeed get evicted from Pen y maes. However, they were given ample time to make arrangements to store their belongings, didn't lose their property through an unwise investment with a family friend and didn't leave their house at 9am with the bailiffs banging on the door. There is no evidence that the Walkers visited the Walton centre in Liverpool in the week leading up to their eviction from Pen y maes and thus no evidence to suggest that they embarked on their walk burdened with the terrible diagnosis that TW had a terminal illness (CBD) with no treatment and no cure, that perhaps left him with only months to live.
July 2013 - they may have visited an esoteric angel experience in Glastonbury but according to the proprietor, Diana Foss, there was no sign of Moth experiencing any physical ailments and the deleted FB (July 23) comments from the son Tristran, suggests that Raymoth spent at least some of the next fortnight body boarding with their son in Newquay rather than prostrate in agony on the floor of Jan's house near Yeovil.
8 Aug - 17 Sept 2013 - the Walkers walked from Minehead to Lands End, possibly with a break in Newquay to stay with their son who, according to Sal's niece Polly,, regularly visited them on the walk for food resupplies etc.
Their walk was never planned to go beyond Lands End and arrangements had been made for her to accommodate them after the walk finished. Many of the incidents described in this section of TSP appear to have been embellished (meeting the mystic at Culbone church/being mistaken for Simon Armitage/winning a pub quiz at Westward Ho) or entirely fabricated (meeting a wine merchant called Grant and getting a massage while being mistaken for SA/giving a recital of Beowulf in St Ives/going to a performance of Iolanthe at the Minack and getting a lift to Treen campsite with the actors in their van after the performance).
The incidents involving the Walkers being shunned by locals and castigated as tramps are difficult to disprove but contrast with the experiences of other individuals who have been made homeless and walked the SWCP (Andy Ault) who received nothing but generosity from the people they met.
The criticism of the hypocrisy of the Christian retreat at Lee abbey (where participants were allegedly charged £120) but in fact Lee Abbey had a policy of offering homeless people such as the Walkers free accommodation had they bothered to enquire!
17 Sept 2013 - June 2015 - far from defying the odds at Lands End and deciding to carry on walking rather than take a bus back home (despite only having £5.20 or £2.50 depending on which account you trust, neither of which would have been enough for the bus fare back to Newquay/Bristol) from their son's FB comments, it seems that they were given a lift back to Bristol and then moved on to stay the next 18 months with an old school friend of Sal's called Polly who apparently rang them up by chance as they neared Polruan in October. Except she didn't and she was their niece! So the first stage of the walk didn't end up in Polruan with the sighting of a peregrine falcon and the donation of £20 from their children to enable them to get the train back home.
What exactly the Walkers did during their stay with Polly seems unclear apart from a couple of day's sheep bagging by Sal. They may have gone off on a couple of short walks during this period but it's extremely unlikely that they managed to walk the rest of the 630 mile SWCP during this period. TW appears to have being getting PIP during this period despite the fact that there doesn't appear to have been much physically wrong with him.
What we do know is that TW visited a neurologist in mid June 2015 and received a very tentative diagnosis of something most resembling corticobasal syndrome. Interestingly he omitted to mention that they had undertaken sections of the SWCP in 2013 and 2014 and were planning to walk further stretches of the path from July 2015. TW's comments that his mother had died in her 50s seem strange (his mother was alive and didn't die until she was in her 80s) but may have played a factor in the neurologist's tentative CBS diagnosis.
July-Aug 2015 Where the Walkers walked in 2014 and 2015 remains unclear. We know they met the Parsons at the FAC on 8 August although unlike the description in TSP they were walking east to west and may have ended this section of the walk at Lands End. Incidents on this section of the walk such as the Australian worker being verbally abused by the owner at the Mullion cafe appear to have been entirely fabricated.
What we do know is that TW started a 3 year HND course in horticulture from Sept 2015, not Sept 2014 as described in TSP. As they were walking west in August 2015, there is no evidence to suggest that they ended their walk in Polruan where they by chance met Anna who offered them accommodation in Polruan before TW started his university course in September. A more likely scenario is that the Walkers stayed in student accommodation, perhaps near St Austell for the first year of TW's course.
In terms of money, the claim that they had to survive on as little as £30pw (at Mousehole) seems far fetched, as by this time TW may have been receiving PIP and this was probably more than £30pw.
July-Aug 2016 - although the walk from Poole back to Polruan is described as having taken place in July/Aug 2014 in TSP, the short walks described by Polly that they undertook while they stayed with her, makes this unlikely. A different scenario is that they walked the stretch between Poole and Polruan from July-Aug 2016 during TW's summer vacation. They would have had accommodation available, and probably been receiving PIP as well as a student loan. So they almost certainly weren't surviving on £30-48pw at this stage of the walk.
Although some incidents that occurred on this stretch of the walk appear to have been embellished (the visit to St Alban's Head NCI where they were charged £1 each for a water bottle refill and told that a walker had recently fallen off a cliff nearby while taking a selfie). The chance meeting with Dave and Julie may have taken place (the shadow of a tent on Chesil Beach in Sal's IG feed corresponds to the account in TSP of them camping alongside each). TW's clothing (khaki trousers) and Sal's rucksack (photo at Adelaide Chapel) suggest a change in clothes/equipment from IG photos taken in 2013 and 2015.
The 2016 walk may have ended in Aug 2016, near Polruan as there is evidence of a meeting at a cafe run by a Costa Rican with Anna and may help explain why the timeline in TSP was concertina'd into 12 months (Aug 2013-Aug 2014) rather than 4 years (Aug 2013-Aug 2016), the last 12 months of which they may have been living in student digs and receiving PIP + student loan payments. As for the peregrine falcon watching local or the man walking a tortoise called Lettuce, there is no evidence that this occurred.
If the Walkers didn't start living in Polruan until Sept 2016, this may explain why nobody in Polruan really remembers them, apart from one person (Boos Coffey) who saw them walking their dog Monty in West St. They left Polruan in Dec 2018 to live at Haye Farm and were only in Polruan for 24 months and for a lot of this time (March - Dec 2018) Sal was busy travelling and promoting TSP.
The health claims of TW's miraculous CBD recovery appear spurious as the first diagnosis didn't occur until June 2015 thus disproving the supposed improvements in TW's condition in 2013 and 2014. In 2016, the improvements take place within a couple of week's of the start of the walk from Poole, again disproving the notion that only after 200 miles of arduous walking did TW see any improvement in his physical condition.
So the story in TSP appears to largely be a load of old cobblers! The claims about homelessness, recovery from CBD, walking 630miles of the SWCP in a little over a year and many of the encounters on the walk, appear largely fabricated. The only two facts which we can be fairly sure about is that they lost their house in Wales in June 2013 and began a new life in Polruan, possibly in 2016. The rest is largely fiction.
As for the shift from glum washing to green washing that occurs in TWS,LL (and possibly OWH) well, according to the previous owners (Alix Vincent) of Haye Farm and numerous other sources, that's also a load of (apple) cobblers!