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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Brilliant! I loved your salty take on Wuthering Heights. And thanks for including the video too - love KB’s flowy red dress and her interpretative dance 🤩🤩

In Leicester there used to be a shop which would deep-fry the chocolate bar of your choice for 50p!

A friend lived for a while in Glasgow. Tall, strapping lad who played rugby, and after training would get a fish supper for tea. One week branched out and got a pie supper. Struggled to eat it all. Surprised at this (see earlier description). Then he realised that the pie had been deep fried 😲😬

Deep fried pizza was also definitely a thing when I was in Glasgow for 2 years in the early 90s… I never had one, but a friend did, and I have to say it didn't look like anything i would have been willing to eat!

Good morning all! It’s taken me ages to catch up, wind, torrential rain and mud.
@DisappointedReader your song for Salray made me literally choke on my breakfast. My mood had been darkening, along with the weather, because of this pair and contributing to my posting lethargy. Thank you for hauling me back up, that was brilliant. I too love Kate’s dress @Fandango52 , big fan of all things Kate since I saw her on Top of the Pops back then.
Happy belated birthday @Freshsocks ! 🎂We share the same day! I hope you enjoyed yours. It was a perfect day here, clear and sunny and I made the most of it with a long walk at sunrise along the path to Maenporth and back, a trip to Truro for cake and supper back in Fal.
I think my glumness about the Walkers intensified after listening to the podcasts and buying the newspapers. There is no doubt, no matter what their most devoted readers may say on the matter, that their ‘brand’ is harmful. As I’ve said before, my heart really goes out to Bill Cole. I can’t imagine how he must be feeling.

😬Indeed!!! @DoubtfulCat

Somebody mentioned the flit from Haye farm recently. There is a discrepancy between how this was portrayed in the books and the reality (naturally). In fact, much like “Through the Looking Glass”, if you simply turn all the events in the books onto their heads and show the opposites, you’ll get the truth. Sally Walker was setting up the reasons for leaving Haye Farm but the deciding factor seemed to be that they were doing all that work on a property which wasn’t theirs, it wasn’t Home and Bill could rapidly pull the carpet from under their feet at any time he wanted to. Bill Cole was the enemy here (I can’t remember his fictional name now), just as Polly had been. If the books were truth, yes, you’d definitely see Ray and Moth settling down on their own piece of land and her caring for him as she constantly reminded us and living happily ever after as Vroom says. That ought to have been the satisfying ending. If Moth really had any sort of debilitating disease, he would have been going downhill quite rapidly within the first ten years and no amount of walking - especially the sort they were peddling as cure - would have helped. I doubt if he would have even been able to put one foot in front of the other. It’s a disgrace. The reality is that they have preyed upon the most trusting and empathetic of people and happily, with no qualms at all, grown rich from their outpourings of love, compassion and of course money.

I haven't read Landlines but the implication that they were fearful Bill Cole could pull the rug from under their feet is maddening, given that we know he was planning to give them the house!

I think re the 'first meet in the college canteen' - I suspect that neither of them can actually remember THAT clearly and they've ret-conned that romantic time from various memeories from both of them and also friends who happened to be there. I don't think they can remember much more than eyes meeting, Mars bar and a chat. I think Sal has rehearsed it over and over in her head so many times, dwelling on the romance and the giggly, self-effacingness of her and Tim's glamour and good looks, that she's convinced herself (and probably Tim, who just seems to smile and go along with whatever she says) of the Twoo Womance of it all.

I signed up and paid a pound and then unsubscribed immediately after watching the podcasts. My subscription is still valid for a month. Which is all I need.

I always feel bad for BC when SW gets to that bit of the patter where she talks about accepting his offer to live in the cider farm.

SW explains that she has a hard time trusting people (she is, after all, an innocent who gets taken advantage of by "Cooper" etc). She would have to "give up her home" (a rented flat in a village where she feels out of place because it is so busy and inquisitive) to go there. She doesn't really like buildings etc - after moving into the farmhouse she chooses to sleep in a tent in the bedroom. And anyway "Moth" is her only home. She says that she took months deciding whether or not to trust BC and accept the farmhouse, and eventually (on one of her decision-making visits) decided to accept when she saw a cow. Plus she describes the farm and farmhouse are described as a sterile dump.

If I were BC, I might have found that reaction to my offer a little underwhelming.

She makes it sound far more as though it was them doing BC the favour against their better judgement and having to turn down a far better life to 'help him out'.

@Peladon sorry to be pedantic but surely it was a deer?

Yes - thank you for putting me back on the path of truth.

Yes, especially when you add it to the way she portrays him as a soft-handed City boy in designer sunglasses, who zooms about on vintage motorbikes and is married to a woman who is also described without much warmth and a rather hostile focus on her ‘power’! (I mean, the woman was recovering from breast cancer — she’s not Genghis Khan surveying her territories!)

Ruth Salperton says she said to him that she didn’t think his portrayal was ‘kind’, and that he dismissed it, saying something like ‘Oh, you know what publishers are like’, the implication being that SW had described him as she did for dramatic effect, prompted by her editor.

And, as reported by CH on the podcast, he said something similar to SW in an email when he was trying to reconcile the end of Landlines, the miracle DAT scan etc with the fact that TW had told him at the same time as that (supposed) DAT scan that he had only a couple of months left to live. He said something like ‘Was the end of LL too optimistic?’, implying that she’d been forced to write an artificially happy ending by her publishers.

I find that desperately sad, somehow. There’s this decent man, who has had his own life problems, who was really touched by TSP, offers the Walkers his beloved farm to run, contemplates making them a gift of it, bends over backwards to try to make it easy and pleasant for them, tolerates them not fulfilling their part of the contract for five years, brings in other people to do their work, excusing SW for depicting him as an out of touch rich boy she doesn’t fully trust, dealing with TW’s temper tantrum, trying to find ways of justifying her book fictions to himself as the result of editorial pressure etc etc.

And to discover finally that he’s been played for a patsy all along and left with tens of thousands of lost farm revenue and unpaid utility bills, and doesn’t even merit a goodbye from people he genuinely thought were his friends.

Thanks to all of you, above, for highlighting this. A massive thank you to Bill Cole for your helpful testimony about the deceit of Tim and Sally Walker. We are so sorry that you have been so hurt by this shabby treatment but you have saved so many other people continuing to be taken in by their lies. ⭐

I read that as "played for a pasty" and laughed out loud.

@Peladon @AbovetheVaultedSky yes, exactly. This is why I’ve been feeling very queasy about it all lately as more and more has been divulged. I can really relate to Bill second guessing and trying to make sense of what she had written, making excuses for why it was so. After five years of getting to know these people, to the extent that you actually want to give them your house, the truth is going to be very difficult to digest. No doubt he went through a period of denial followed by many other emotions over these awful, gutless, losers.
Despite everything we know of them, the kind of people they are, it still shocks me that they didn’t bother to pay any of the utility bills at the farm! She was a “prize winning” author by then fgs… why not? Obviously I know the reason and just think there are no depths these two won’t sink to.

I wonder if there was a bit of cognitive dissonance in there too. He just simply couldn't allow himself to believe that the Walkers could be as bad as they looked - he'd LIKED them after all. And admitting that he'd been fooled would be quite difficult, so at first he was trying really hard to make himself believe that they were good people really who had just been overtaken by events.

And it was only later and with some distance that he could admit that he'd been had. It can sometimes be astounding how victims of scams bend over backwards to justify how they have been treated, because it's hard to admit that you fell for it.

I still find it mildly baffling that they didn’t make cider, or accept the help BC was offering them to make it, pay the utilities, and leave in a less contemptuous and abrupt way that didn’t leave BC feeling quite so betrayed. It seems unnecessarily stupid to have created an extra enemy with an awful lot of data on them.

I mean, I get that they’d painted themselves into a corner with the whole’Yay! Miracle scan!’ book version of events vs the ‘Boo! I’m dying in January!’ face to face version, and the situation with BC was clearly starting to feel untenable, but they made a needless enemy there.

Just as they did with ‘Anne’, exploiting her generosity, not even making token efforts at helping on her farm while they lived there for free and the rest of the family were rallying round while her husband was incapacitated, buggering off on holidays whenever they had money, and then portraying her as a cynical, greedy slave driver in TSP.

I think it is so good that Bill has Ruth Saberton as a neighbour. It has been very upsetting for her and she says:
It has become very clear that I never knew the Winns, or more accurately the Walkers, at all.

This has been the conclusion of some of the others who have spoken to Chloe. Debbie Hemmings said we don't really know them and even Sally's niece Anne.

It's like those people who lie needlessly just for the sake of it, isn't it?

Usually people who've written books are the nicest people in the world (she said, modestly), because we want people to buy our books! If the word goes out that you're a bitchy back-biter who doesn't pay bills and is generally unpleasant, it's incredible how fast that word can spread and book sales can drop as a result. So we all tend to be smiley, outgoing and lovely people (in public, in private we can be as foul as the next person), because if you are in the public eye AT ALL you need to be well thought of.

Sal and Tim obviously thought they were SO famous they didn't need to bother to even pretend.

I agree @AbovetheVaultedSky it is baffling. In the books you get such a different view point. Everything they were offered was a dream come true - for Ray and Moth. For Sally and Tim, not so much. So Sally has write an altered version of events for Ray and Moth. Sally and Tim had no time for doing any of the hard work, they just liked the image of doing so. A lot of photo shoots were done during this time and they were celebrities.

Incidentally wth shouldn’t Bill enjoy his vintage motorbikes?? She’s even got to make digs about somebody else’s passion when they work hard to get what they want in life. She’s very jealous and malicious.

To return to late 80s/early 90s mortgages & property for a second, if Tim really did invest half their capital (from the first house sale) in a deal gone wrong, surely the investment wasn't that much to merit them seeking recompense of £100,000 from Cooper?

They bought house no. 1 after getting married in 1986. Then sold in c.1992. So that's 6 years of mortgage repayments and a deposit. Let's assume for arguments sake the property value was £75,000 and that they paid a 10% deposit of £7,500. I am not savvy with interest rates etc but even if they paid off some of the mortgage over 6 years, the amount they got from the sale could hardly have been much more than they put in, but for arguments sake lets say they doubled it, so got back £15,000.

So if Tim invested half of this i.e £7,500, with Cooper, how was it that by 2008 (as written in rebuttal) that Cooper owed them £100,000 (which he paid them via a loan). An inflation calculator puts the value of the investment at just £11,367.

I know this is all hypothetical but i don't think the numbers need to be accurate to paint a picture of how unlikely this all was.

LL is even more a pack of lies than TSP. Amazing how there are so few recollections from others of meeting the Walkers on their LL travels despite SW now being well known. Just a rather feeble attempt to recreate the TSP formula with yet more miracle cures for Moth.

And did anyone spot her doing so at the time?