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]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 22 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?

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

The whole thing is so easy to prove. All they have to do is ask Moth’s neurologist to make a statement to the Press. She’s already said the books are a record of his health and she has made his health a public matter. She has monetised it. Shared it with Hollywood A-listers! She shared intimate details of him losing control of his bladder and sphincter muscles. What is there to lose from having the neurologist prove that they have been telling the truth? I could only see a gain.
So, why the silence? If I was accused of this and I had the proof to prove otherwise I would have shown it straight away and then taken The Observer to court.
I suspect i know why the (wild) silence.

Oh how I wish fitness were more long-lasting! (Speaking as someone who's trying to get back into physical activity and was actually very fit a couple of years ago.). I think it's easy to think that way at least a bit. But then you try doing something and the reality hits you. But if there's no reality then I guess it will never hit...

I bet Raynor and Moth are kicking themselves for not thinking of this idea for a book and getting in there first.

A Year of Nothing

What happens when you step off the treadmill of constant striving? In an age of side hustles, burnout and endless self-optimisation, Gannon charts a year in which she deliberately does “nothing” in the way the world measures success: no big launches, no grand reinventions, no chasing the next thing. Instead, she experiments with slowness, smaller stakes and saying no.

The Observer are inviting us to this talk by the writer Emma Gannon:

Together, we’ll ask: What if doing less is the bravest choice? How do you tell the difference between giving up and letting go? And what might a “good” year look like if you stopped keeping score?

@RainyTuesdaysAndSunnyWednesdays "Birds generally migrate south but water bird species such as Shoveler, Pochard, Gadwall, Water Rail, Common Snipe and various geese species all arrive from colder climates to spend the winter here, along with fruit-loving Fieldfare and Redwing."

I doubt that SW was imagining herself as a common snipe.

The BBC R4 episode of On Your Farm, first broadcast September 2020 and featuring the Dastardly Duo simperingly holding forth about living on Haye Farm, popped up just now on my BBC Sounds recommendations. So I listened to it. Reader, I puked ... 😤

Yes, absolutely! Great post. She definitely would if she could.
The “highly misleading” accusation has fallen very flat now too.
The claims that all debts had been paid, obviously aren’t true either.
On a related note, it’s horrible when you move in to a new house and you get inundated with somebody else’s fines. This has happened to me in the past with a rented property whose previous tenant had skipped off back to Italy having built up council tax bills, parking fines, speeding tickets. I kept “returning to sender” instead of opening these and came home one day to find an unsealed envelope with a threatening letter inside from a debt collecting company employed by the council. It threatened that they had the right to gain entry and take goods up to the value of these fines. I was absolutely furious. I had previously asked the estate agents to track the previous tenant down, to call the council and tell them but no action had been taken. There was a number to call on the debt collection letter, which I rang and they finally stopped. Yeah, so piles of some other person’s misdeeds and probably a lot of threats as well is not a nice thing. They always leave behind a lot of mess for someone else to clean up. I wonder what they’re doing in their rented mansion now? Are they running up a lot of unpaid bills there? How are they going to do a flit from this one I wonder?
Yes, they are parasites and I do love that very graphic description. I’ve thought of them as cuckoos before.

Luckily @DisappointedReader provided buckets in the charabanc for just such occasions 🪣

I fear I didn't make it in time 😥

I can’t edit my previous post, so just wanted to add that I eventually started opening the post even though I know you’re not supposed to, to find out what it was, so discovered it was all fines and unpaid bills, speeding tickets. It all had “urgent” stamped on it. Returning post with an explanation of it being a rented property and no such person living there now, wasn’t the right thing to do I’m told. It’s an awful situation.

She may see us that way though? 🤔

Agree entirely - when in a similar situation I called at the organisation involved (it happened to be a bank) and spoke to the manager. I didn't want sympathy, only the reassurance that he would set the signal on their computer not to issue further correspondence to "Mr X" at our address, as he had in fact left 10 years ago. I was politely told that only Mr X could authorise this change of address. So much for the Data protection Act which is supposed to ensure info held, whether on paper or digitally, is kept up to date(or deleted if no longer relevant.)
Ironic and appropriate that the successor to the Walkers at the Welsh property was a retired policewoman.

We had bailiffs knocking for the previous homeowner once! Luckily they did go away and leave us alone when we told them they had moved to France (which as far as we knew they had.....but in retrospect 🤷)

We had bailiffs knocking for the couple who lived in the basement floor under our London flat, and who always seemed to be in some precarious financial predicament and never opened their curtains (probably not unrelatedly).

I once opened the front door about 8 am to what turned out to be two large leather-jacketed men from the bailiffs', who were completely taken aback to be greeted at the door by a barefoot woman in a long ballgown and elbow-length gloves (I had just come home from an all-nighter, this being back in my rackety, childfree days) and clearly at first thought I was only pretending not to be the neighbours. We eventually sorted it out.

The neighbours are still living there, though we've long since moved on, so I suppose they got out of debt!

But it was actually quite stressful, continually seeing threatening notices come through the door, not all in envelopes.

@UpfromSomerset Ironic and appropriate that the successor to the Walkers at the Welsh property was a retired policewoman.
Ep. 3
Yes completely brilliant that all SalTim's chickens came home to roost with the new occupant's persistence. Uncovering that Sal had wrongly registered Raynor as the director of Emmaus, but then giving the Haye Farm address in Cornwall. They still didn't reply to her so she calls Bill who has been so badly treated by them. The combination then gives both of their names x 2, the Pwllheli address.

Do we know when she phoned BC? Do people think she's the person who contacted CH in the first place? I know CH says in the podcast that person has chosen 'not to come forward', but I suppose that might be a professional courtesy to someone who'd agreed to be involved in the podcast, but may not have necessarily wanted to be outed as the one who kickstarted the whole Observer investigation...?

So when I first learnt this info, on the podcast, this was when they were first released so I just posted a cryptic : a missing piece of the jigsaw, for me, has been filled.

As you say, then because of the wish for anonymity I didn't want to flag it up. Of course, we don't know who contacted her but I am in no doubt this is when a cluster of chickens gathered! She called BC a year after they had left,

I’m not sure we should speculate. Our Chloe has kept her source anonymous which is professional of her. If this person wished their identity to be known, I’m sure they would’ve said so already.

I completely agree with you. Please read both my posts carefully. All this information is in the podcast and contributed by those involved.

Oops. I've been using those to cool the cider.

Am I alone in finding Sal's continuing silence very telling? If anything in the Observer's podcasts could be proven to be untrue or to be a 'misunderstanding' then surely there would be news of some kind of legal action being taken by now. She would be shouting it from the rooftops if a lawyer had taken the case on and issued proceedings, surely?

And I wonder whether all the 'now paid' bills have happened abruptly in the last six months in an attempt to prevent more disgruntled people from approaching Chloe?

If she agreed to be on the podcast and was OK with having her own (impressive) sleuthing highlighted, I'm sure MF realised that people might put two and two together.

I mean, I'm certainly not by any means convinced it is her.

It's just a possibility that occurred to me.

But it's equally possible it's no one whose name has ever been mentioned.

If SW's theft was was a widespread rumour around Pwllheli, there must have been ample opportunity for someone to see 'Raynor Winn's photo on a copy of TSP, or a familiar face promoting the book on TV/in the press, and put two and two together, and who didn't, unlike the Hemmingses and their former employees, think they were bound by the NDA.

Sal does read poetry!

Afternoon all. I hope you are well today.

<places a steadying hand on the tiller around the source speculation>

< puts in order with hardware store for extra buckets after a) Vroom's misappropriation and b) what TT has just posted - happy pills as well as buckets needed for the industrial levels of glumwashing contained therein >

At the Observer evening a couple of weeks ago, Chloe said that they are not being threatened with litigation.

Yes, I suspect Sal would have yelled long and hard if there had been anything to threaten them with. Which does seem to indicate that all of Chloe's findings are true and it only remains for PRH to decide what approach they are going to take from now on.