Thread 23 : 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?

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?

Thread 22:www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5470952-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?

Most recent:

• Salt Path: A Very British Scandal, available on Sky Documentaries and NOW TV, 15th December 2025
• ‘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
• Observer Newsroom: The Real Salt Path Story, Thursday 8th January 2026

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. For over 6 months we have done amazingly well together for 22 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 22,000 posts there are still new things to look out for on the path:
Podcast series (7 episodes) from The Observer's award-winning Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou, 13th January 2026.
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer

After listening to some of The Walkers: The real Salt Path podcast episodes from The Observer today my thoughts are even more with the victims. I also believe that the publishers, agent and prizegivers must now act and be seen to act.

Please start each post with the podcast episode you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so. Many thanks.

As always, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 22 IS FULL

Very clear distinction, so no charges leading to a criminal conviction, Sally would have a police record for being arrested and questioned. She could have been arrested and questioned more than once possibly?

The aurora is going off right now - even Bournemouth got a display 🥳

Do we take Sal’s word for it that she had “a police record” though?
She’s clearly wanting to tug the heart strings of the family to prevent her being cast into a mash up of Bad Girls/Scum/Prisoner:Cell Block H (because it’s Sal writing this story, so no deep research has been done). What really is a “police record”? Perhaps there was something in her history which could be used to tip a balance towards a custodial sentence, but equally there may not be.
Of course, the pressure you’d feel if she said that and she did end up in jail, it would be on your head, wouldn’t it? (it should be on the head of the fraudster committing the theft, of course).

In terms of OWH, if, as ep 3 of Chloe's podcast suggests that much of the content of Sal's 4th book will revolve around the rewilding of Haye Farm (Ray at Haye), doesn't this in turn suggest that, apart from the 10 days of the C2C walk, huge swathes of the book will need to be rewritten? if so, how would that correlate with a release date of 22 Oct 2026?

But isn’t she just referring to the Martin Hemmings embezzlement, when we know from Ros H that the police were called, and that SW was arrested and questioned?

No, I think that was just BC’s impression of what her next book was going to be about when the Walkers were still living on his farm and they were planning to go into business together. It’s not actually clear to me whether that was before or after she’d written Landlines (though presumably before its publication, as that was when BC became very suspicious, and the Walkers did yet another quick flit shortly afterwards.).

I mean, maybe it’s true and that’s what the next book was going to be about at one point, but then SW decided there needed to be more TW-related jeopardy and walking, so decided to up the ante with a 1000- mile walk and a miracle DAT scan?

I doubt much or any of OWH can have been set at Haye, unless SW wants to spin a sugary little story around their departure (because they’d rewilded it, and needed to move on to work their healing magic elsewhere?)

Though, as people have pointed out on here, walking part of the C2C path, broken off by bad weather, doesn’t sound like the guts of a book either..,?

I've got to admit I can't quite see the point of OWH. The C2C walk only lasts for about 10 days and Sal spends time in BnBs rather than wild camping. Moth isn't with her, but there isn't much jeopardy attached to that as we know he was hale and hearty when he appeared treading the red carpet at the TSP film opening in London at the end of May.

So apart from a cynical money making exercise on the part of PRH loosely based on a bit of walking (like TWS) what is the point? Guess we will just have to wait and see!

Maybe Moth is apparently declining & Ray is coming to terms with that.

Inspired by SW, I also now sleep in a tent in my bedroom because it feels safe.

https://www.countryliving.com/uk/wildlife/countryside/a64976957/raynor-winn-the-salt-path-interview/?link_source=ta_first_comment&taid=68481e63688ef000016deee9&utm_campaign=trueanthemFBCLUKfirstcomment&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

They are increasingly a thing!

They have put their tent up right in the middle of the path. In the middle of the day (Timmoth's short shadow).

If they'd walked any distance to get there, I would expect there to be jackets, water bottles etc lying around and the rucksacks would have been opened to access a snack..

This picture is entirely consistent with having packed two dummy rucksacks, driven to the nearest carpark to the landmark, popped the tent up, taken the photo, and then taken it down again.

And not at all consistent with being an overnight stop of any kind.

Agree & it’s not the only photo of this kind. The orchard shots etc.

Or Moth realises he doesn't want to be dragged on yet another "healing" walk when he knows he isn't dying, while Ray refuses to accept the game is up walks anyway with a cardboard cutout of Moth, or is it Simon A? It's hard for anyone to really tell the difference...

Well that may be true now - he is headless!

The weather in the photo implied by the clouds and the sky is quite at odds from the description in TSP - staying the night there in a howling gale!

And those backpacks should be holding all their provisions for the week long- love-in on the ledge (Warning : @DisappointedReader )

I think OWH is a desperation book. She'd signed the contract (and presumably received at least the first part of the advance) without considering what to write about. Even the two books following TSP were thin and really just harping on and covering old ground, so I think Sal was so bowled over by the success of TSP and possibly also talked into writing more books by publisher and agent, that she signed for more books that she could possibly write.

If we accept that TSP (for all its many, many.....many faults) was a success and was also based on the plot of a book she'd already written (HNTDDD), then I think we can also assume that Sal is subject to the law of diminishing returns. She had one book in her. She's now written it twice in different forms. Then she's presented with the possibility of a whacking great advance for more books - she's not going to turn it down, is she?

Problem is that she then has to actually write those books. She can string out the drama of TSP for a bit, pad it with the cliched 'nature writing'; lots of worry about Tim's health, healing through nature - but she's not got anything new, nothing original to offer now. She never planned to write a series, she signed for sequels without knowing what to write - and the chickens are coming home to roost.

I wonder if part of the delay for OWH wasn't just the 'author distress' but also because editors had her frantically rewriting in an attempt to produce something saleable, even BEFORE Our Chloe got going?

Yes, it reminds me of some of the funny, sleuthing threads on hiking Reddit about people faking doing the LandsEnd to John O’Groats walk. I think I only came across them because of these TSP threads, but I thoroughly enjoyed the sleuthing.

There was a YouTuber who claimed to be the youngest person to have done LEJOG solo and wild camping, and Reddit was having a lot of fun pointing out the box-fresh runners in which he appeared to have covered some challenging stages, his implausibly light pack and visible cleanliness, the haircut he had managed to fit in, and the fact that while he often appeared to be vlogging from the middle of nowhere, if he’d turned in the other direction, you would see it was often close to road with a car park.

(They concluded, I think, that he’d walked and camped for the first few days and then got a lift.)

I think you've just described what The Observer said that they would be interested in featuring regarding these threads. I think sleuthing has been an important part of it but has often added to our carefully considered take on what has been written by Sal.

An example is the tent in front of Q A's Grotto, shared by @ThompsonTwin and the different observations we have shared regarding it.

I agree. I think you can see the law of diminishing returns at work in TWS and LL.

TWS is an attempt to pad out a ‘what happened next’ narrative, with the missing year removed, SW’s mother’s death moved from its RL date, TW’s studies moved up, and a walking holiday in Iceland also stuck into a largely fictional timeline. It sold purely on curiosity about what happened next, and cutesy details like SW erecting their tent in the bedroom.

LL is her realisation that she needs to go back and echo her TSP USP, and try to replicate the two successful elements of the TSP brand — TW’s failing health and a long walk (even though the walk couldn’t be more different, because it’s a long holiday, bolstered by van collection services, hotels, taxis, GPS and ordering replacement gear online etc, and carefully ignoring the fact that they’ve become the people they sneered at in TSP, well-off retirees on holiday, rather than plucky, starving underdogs.)

We know that she was signed for a three-book deal after TSP, so she needs to crank another one out. Who knows why the rewilding at Haye book didn’t happen? Possibly BC was already too suspicious. Or she’d never really intended to write another book about Haye, and they’d decided to move on.

Either way, she needs material, and it’s not clear if the reading public can cope with another ‘he’s near death, lying in a pool of his own urine — oh, hang on, now he’s walking a 1000-mile hike and miraculously cured’ plotline.

Maybe it was going to be a glumwashing of fame and riches, and how all her speaker events were too taxing, and how all SW really wants is a pack on her back and a path at her feet, even if TW is now too frail to accompany her?

how all SW really wants is a pack on her back and a path at her feet,

Is Sal about to turn herself into a latter day John Clare? I am! Now there's a thought!

I am! yet what I am who cares, or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost.
And yet I am—I live—though I am toss'd

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.

Hence my username. I love that poem.

Yes, perhaps we could suggest to SW that she ‘go mad’ again, as when TW’s mother tried to confront her about the theft and she pretended to hear voices and locked herself in a cupboard, be confined to a psychiatric hospital some distance from home, escape, and make her way home to Cornwall on foot.

Only, from what I remember, someone has already retraced Clare’s walk in a book, and to get the full effect, SW would have to have forgotten she was married to TW and suffer from the delusion that she was married to a pre-TW boyfriend, now dead. And that she’d written the works of Shakespeare and Byron. (Also, for full authenticity, TW has to recommit her after a few months.)

I signed on the dole in vacations while a medical student in the 1970s. Supplementary benefit wasn’t a lot but it was still worth claiming.

The pity party blurb for OWH of Salray flying North like an escaping albatross or whatever because Timoth's health is declining etc etc was always going to be called into question by the pictures of said Timoth on the red carpet, after the OWH walk was apparently done, looking the picture of health despite apparently being too unwell to have undertaken another 'healing' trek.

They do it to themselves, really. It just doesn't add up.

Yes, this take on Tim I always found amusing:

those taken alongside Isaacs around the time of the film’s release, where he appeared more dashing, perhaps, than the Hollywood actor enlisted to play him.

‘I’m Reconsidering What The Salt Path Author Told Me’