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.

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Great analysis. Thanks.

Re: 3 book deal after TSP. That is according to what RW told BC as recounted in the podcast. However, articles by the bookseller, which have been shared here previously, suggest TWS was a standalone book deal , with LL and OWH being a 2 book deal. Could it be that RW lied to BC? Or is it merely that it seemed like a 3 book deal to BC because she got the two others after TWS?

I wonder if the hiding from Tim's mother in a cupboard episode was the inspiration for hiding under the stairs from bailiffs. Who knows, maybe when the MiL was looking for her she saw 500 Mile Walkies and imagined her escape on the Salty Path only to write it a few years later.

There is another fond reference to being in a cupboard (Oh no - yet another Alert : @DisappointedReader )

As I recall, students could get unemployment benefit during university holidays

And housing benefit

And grants were grants, not loans, so didn't have to be repaid

I claimed some kind of benefit in the late 80s during my holidays from Uni. I can’t remember what it was. Maybe income support?

Is it remarkable that Sally did 2 years of a law degree (allegedly, according to her in Career Interrupted podcast) yet she failed to follow court procedure when submitting her shining white piece of tissue paper of truth lies.? Maybe not, given 20 years had elapsed. Though, intriguing she didn't mention her law experience in TSP court case chapter.

On another note, if they moved to Wales abruptly in 1992 (when Pen y Maes was on the market in March), it seems unlikely to do with her job at Burton court because she would have been on mat leave with her daughter born in Nov 1991 (i believe statutory was 18 weeks paid leave). Unless she went back to work briefly and then suddenly moved later on in 1992. [ETA] Or was she obliged to return to work following mat leave due to recieving the pay, and she instead did a runner?

Being cynical, which is always the path to truth with the Walkers, I suspect the intention with OWH was to capitalise on David Nicholl's novel of the C2C path with a "true" love story about SW pining for TW during her freezing trek of unbelievable endurance.

I thought there was only 18 months between the children - doesn't that put the daughter in 1990? Sorry, I can't find any notes on this any more.

Yes my mistake. Unemployment benefit was rebranded as income support around that time

Oh, I'm sure the red carpets and hobnobbing with A-listers will be thoroughly glumwashed in SW's imitable style.

Just like she managed to turn the moment a major publishing house wanted to buy her book (I was about to say 'debut' but stopped myself), a happy, triumphant moment for any writer, into a glumfest about stale urban office air, overly 'elegant' editors and agents, and the whole thing reminding her of TW miserably picking lint off his jacket with trembling fingers in the courtroom where her magic piece of paper was refused and they lost everything.

'The red carpet swam in front of my eyes. The elegant actress by my side was too elegant and at ease. Could she really be playing me, the frazzle-haired wild spirit, only at home leaning into the salt wind on the Path, her only home the fragile grasp of her fellow wild spirit, now looking altogether too chummy with said elegant actress and, come to think of it, far too healthy and robust-looking for our brand? Dammit, I knew there was a reason I never let him do publicity, should have put him on a diet and made him use a wheelchair '

*Oh, to be flying north like an albatross returning to its spawning ground! more nature filler in here, check whether albatrosses fly north or have a spawning ground and to have a simple pack on my back and a muddy path at my booted feet, away from this red carpet, stale air, and the flash of cameras!'

The equipment below is apparently what Sal took on her 1,000 mile/4 month walk from Cape Wrath to Polruan. Looks ridiculously small to me.

It was some time before 5th July 2025 when OWH was being hyped-up as yet another "must read" sequel to TSP, TWS an LL! But no secret was made of the fact that the essential ingredient, (which as we have discussed, contributed hugely to the best selling success of TSP) that is, of using LD walking as a "miracle cure" (of a terminal illness) was absent. RW was striding out solo, Moth too poorly to take part.
I'm sure that when I followed a link last year to a recording of SW - in the role RW at a literary festival - where her response to the question "we hear you have another book in the offing", she replied by outlining the plot of OWH i.e. the walk itself and the revelation that Moth would not be taking part. Then she went on to intrigue the audience (and me!) by stating that there was an unusual twist to the story which obviously she was not going to reveal before publication. Buy the book to find out! Pre-orders gladly accepted!
Sorry I don't remember details of the actual post with the link, but I'm sure I have remembered correctly.
So the eventual fate of OWH will be of interest - surely it can't be abandoned completely, or can it?

Yes I remember her saying this. I have subsequently taken it to be her somewhat changing her brand to emphasise the touring Gigspanner gigs and a massive plug, in OWH, for the wellness retreats. She was promoting two important projects for the brand in Spring 2026 - so yet more themes that OWH can't now lean into.

Relying largely on SW in the Career Interrupted interview (I know, I know) this period, in which 'babies were not part of the plan', goes as follows:

• SW has a full time job at Burton Magistrates court taking parking fines and other 'nonsense' (her word) from people who have 'come in'
• the opportunity arises to do a law degree remotely and one week into her studies (so Sept 1988?) she realises she is pregnant
• First child (son) born early summer 1989 as 'four weeks later' she does her first end of year law exams
• she now has a baby, a full time job, and is in her second year of law degree studies which involves going away on study leave for a week at a time, leaving Moth with their son. Difficult because Moth 'needed to work'. They are also renovating the house (Forest Row) - plaster off, wires hanging, garden dug up for veg.
• Becomes pregnant again (early 1990)
• Second child (daughter) born late 1990
• SW goes back to work after D is born but something has to give and she drops the law degree (summer 1991? - think there's mention somewhere that she took and passed the second year exams)
• A realisation that money earned going to work (even on a better pay grade with the benefit of a degree) is just going on childcare (this is fuzzy, it's not clear exactly when she stopped work)
• SW stops work and grows veg instead
• 1992 - SW is 30 when they find their dream house in the hills, Moth 'gives up his job', they sell their house and move to Wales

@RockyPath, is that podcast interview available somewhere? I know you or someone else linked it upthread, but that link wasn't active for me, and you seemed to need to be a subscriber -- intriguing information, though!

E283｜No home. No money. No plan – just a backpack and a map. Raynor Winn on the story behind The Salt Path by Career Interrupted | Podchaser

thanks to @RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays

Here it is, kindly provided by @RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays up thread.

https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/career-interrupted-901382/episodes/e283no-home-no-money-no-plan-j-256698766

Apologies..got my years wrong.

Thanks, and also for raising this earlier and now @RockyPath has given us the timeline. Previously, we were skirting the issue of the children for many reasons but it is relevant. I had been thinking of their rough ages yesterday when @AbovetheVaultedSky described the weird dialogue Sal used and said she had student-aged children. I was thinking they were mid to late twenties by the time TSP was published. They have also continued to aid their parents' brand and are now mid-thirties.

It does sound as if SW was the one at the counter at Burton Mags taking cash and cheques from people coming in to pay their parking and other fines. The reference to these fines as 'nonsense' is somewhat revealing in the light of what we now know about SW's cavalier attitude to other people's money. If she's capable of stealing from her mother, her MIL and her employer, she's capable of stealing from the state and random citizens of Burton. Hmm.

Thanks for summarising that.

An inconsistency is that she says she completed the 2nd year exams ( which would be summer 1990) while looking after 2 children. Except no. 2 was born in November 1990.

I struggle to believe the degree story tbh. Is it realistic one would give up after so much effort to make it work through 2 pregnancies esp as she didn't drop out sooner. Plus her motivation seems more about earning potential than any passion or dream to enter law.

As far as I have found in the many interviews, she has only ever retold this part of her life for this podcast...about INTERRUPTED CAREERS. Strikes me as made up to make herself sound relevant for the podcast.

Add to the long appropriation list: interrupted careers due to motherhood, and mothers who juggle everything to keep their careers going.

Thank you, @RockyPath and @RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays!

I fear that from the earliest moments, I have been laughing heartily. How tragic that she had to fill freezers in a frozen food shop and work selling car parts in cubicle a garage when what she really wanted is to write books. Sal, pretty much everyone who has ever written a book has written it around a FT job.

'Fines for parking or some other nonsense' -- well, explains the deluge of unpaid parking and speeding fines that were arriving at Pen y Maes. Because clearly sensible people don't pay them?

This interview makes the move to Wales sound far more planned and part of an overall vision for getting back to the land, not some kind of split second decision based on losing money in a bad investment and it being all they could afford, or a child getting out onto the road, or a random decision based on a traffic jam that sent them on holiday to Wales rather than Scotland (all of which I think I've seen elsewhere).

She also says that not only did they lose the twenty years they'd put into Pen y Maes but the previous ten too, because that was 'where the money came from'.

And the poor interviewer, listening to all this guff about bailiffs hammering and how they hadn't even been planning to attend TW's 'routine medical appointment' because they were too busy packing up their house, shaking her head sympathetically and saying 'Even as you talk about this, I can feel it.'

That she'd specifically looked for a female agent because she thought a woman would 'understand her story'.

The interviewer saying she hadn't realised until she picked it up that 'it was a non-fiction book'. Snort.

How SW feels terribly uncomfortable now when she starts to feel 'surrounded by material things'. I don't know, SW, Ruth Salperton seemed very sure that TW is a bit of a Material Girl, and was coveting her shiny new Land Rover despite her telling him that she, fit and well, found it difficult to drive.

And not one but two contraceptive failures in immediate succession, at the most inconvenient possible time, when she's studying and working FT? Hmm.

I agree. It's a 'specialist' interview with a particular angle and I have little doubt that she has bent and twisted what really happened to fit a 'poor mum juggling work, babies, home and study' to fit the brief.

I do think the details of her job are revealing though.

Her coy little trailer for OWH at the end describes being up to her knees in snow at -10 on the Coast to Coast path and says 'Why was I there alone? That's a big question!' and then, a bit more weirdly, something like 'The main theme of this book is the nature of our connection to the natural world and is that real or is it actually something much deeper that we should be looking for?'

Was SW going to get religion or something?