Thread 24 : To feel disappointed - and now disgusted and vindicated 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 23 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?
Thread 23:www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5475246-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?

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 23 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 23,000 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 (and including a shoutout to our threads), 13th January 2026:

The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer

• The Observer, 18th January 2026:

The Salt Path scandal: a hunch, a hint and six months of ... and Publishers agree The Salt Path crossed a line | The Observer

• BBC Podcast, 28th January 2026 (to be confirmed)

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.

After listening to of The Walkers: The real Salt Path podcast episodes from The Observer 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.

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

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 23 IS FULL

It has been great to have your support and interest from Australia and also @Bauds1 from NZ/Aotearoa. Still no news re: the BBC podcast - although I think that looks more interesting as it is BBC Wales with Welsh speakers and hopefully a few more insights.

You probably saw that there is to be a short video about HNTDDD, too.

The Costa Rican cafe owner confirmed that Tim and Sal did come to his cafe as backpackers, did meet Anna, did get the offer of accommodation in Polruan and did dance outside the cafe with joy. They also drank a couple of bottles of Corona afterwards. Pretty much as described in TSP BUT this was not the Talland Bay Cafe - it was another place. And it happened in 2016

There is so much to unpick but this stood out, the 2016 element.

That and herding sheep with cats of course and the American football story. I am utterly mind boggled by 'Timoth's Tall Tales', I really am. Perhaps he should write a book, he seems to have more imagination than Salray, who can only manage riffs on the same material.

Yes to your last paragraph. In TWS she completely fabricates a consultation and diagnosis. All of it is words that were never spoken and a consultation that never took place at that time.

@RueMouffetard yes, I hadn’t thought of that sort of article. I think you’re right.

Yes, I remember the photos that she had released on her IG was in 2016, and they looked like that as the two of them looked older, and it looked like the tent had just been erected there for the photo, etc. But of course we couldn't know. So it is good to have the confirmed 2016 as it always seemed like they went out for a short reccy here and there after the 2013/4 time.

TSP was really patched together. Of course then, by the time they met Anna at Polruan Moth had received that first 2015 medical letter and could really play up to his supposed death sentence. They both could.

My misery at knowing what these two have done has got worse 😞 it’s a horrible feeling that eats away. I completely understand Simon Armitage’s demeanour when approached for comment.

Yes and this bit from Chloe was interesting:

a fellow student there who told me Tim told everyone on the course that he was dying of CBD but over the years they were studying, he had a few funny turns and had to leave class but he never deteriorated and so this fellow class mate had some suspicions about how ill he might have been

To me, he still acts like a childish show-off and that is the main thing wrong with him.

Agree. I can understand that he doesn't want to get further drawn publically into all this, especially while he's still PL, interesting as his opinions would be.

Really grateful to Our Chloe for her engagement on the AMA, she was so good.

I think that if it suited you (for some reason!) to think you had a specific illness, then you could infer that you had it from this letter, or use this letter as evidence you had it.

Or, if you were a catastrophiser or had chronic health anxiety, you could conclude, with horror, that you definitely had CBD and dash to google with rising panic, ignoring the letter’s caveats about how it’s not a firm diagnosis and that you clearly have a very mild and non-progressive version, and that most of the PSPA charity’s info won’t apply to you.

I suppose we can’t entirely rule out that the Walkers genuinely interpreted this consultant letter in the blackest possible light at the time.

But, given its temporal place in the series of RL events that were rearranged and massaged into the fictional timeline of TSP (ie. two years after the real house repossession, after two of the walking holidays the Walkers took during their 18 months at Anne’s, around the end of the time they spent living at SW’s mother’s house, just before TW embarked on a horticulture degree with the full blessing of his consultant, and also around the time they met the Australians at Fat Apples by which time they were claiming to be walking the entire SWCP, TW’s illness was in place in their self-presentation, but the homelessness angle wasn’t yet), it seems most likely to have been one of the things that struck either SW or both Walkers as a useful, heartstrings-plucking additional hook for her essentially fictional memoir.

ETA, I know someone has said this before on here, but it seems very likely to me that meeting the Parsons inspired the homelessness angle of TSP?

David Parsons had been working as a bricklayer when a back injury left him unable to work, they couldn’t keep up with their mortgage repayments, and they had been living in a caravan ever since, apart from stints of house or pet sitting, or cheap walking holidays like the one they were on. Not hard to imagine the Walkers thinking ‘Oh, that would be a good angle, if we shift things around a bit, and come up with a blameless reason for losing our house…’

I am enjoying the thought of the turmoil that an offer of a large financial sum for an honest interview must be causing Sal.

On the one hand - loadsamoney! What she's been working for all this time (and achieving through mostly nefarious means). She could earn a big whack and nobody could dispute it.

On the other hand - she'd have to be honest. Come out and admit to the theft, manipulation of facts, lies about everything (because you can bet that this would be fact-checked to within an inch of its life and any paper paying a significant sum wouldn't let her get away with 'I can't remember' or 'my truth'. They will want the juicy goss).

So which way will she jump, do we think?

I think you're right. There is a mismatch between the notion of them interpreting the consultation with visceral despair and truely believing Tim had CBD vs exploiting that and rejigging the timeline for the purposes of a book. To me it very much seems they intentionally misrepresented the diagnosis, which they knew to be mild, to write a compelling yarn involving terminal illness. I just can't fathom someone exploiting a genuine fear of death like this, which leads me to conclude there was never any serious fear in the minds of the Walkers, but perhaps low level concern.

Honestly Vroomie, I don't think the right amount of money would be on offer for such an ego bruising, how are the mighty fallen experience, not for someone who seems unable to take responsibility for anything, ever and to whome honesty is an alien concept.

A mea culpa book, that she could slant in a more 'positive' way than a journalist doing an article would tolerate might be more of a temptation but still don't think she'd do it. However, I suppose an awful lot depends on the current state of their finances.

Well, she'd be brilliant at the Pizza Express, Woking distraction. The whole way she writes, answers questions is like this.

"But I think they have been greatly affected by all the negative publicity, both financially and emotionally"

"But all coms are through her legal team. I can't say more about the emails because they are headed NOT FOR PUBLICATION and I must respect this."

"We did decide not to publish certain things mainly because we wanted to balance what we felt the public should know and the fact that SW and TW have a right to privacy.
So whenever we felt that it was too sensitive and did not make a material difference to how the public understood the story we left it out. Obviously I can't go into detail about those aspects of the story."

– CH (OC)

When OC said she thought they'd been affected emotionally and financially I wondered how she could possibly know but maybe the clues lie in the 2nd and 3rd quotes above? I suspect they'll continue to lie low, although in some Black Mirror-esque twist of fate, and once the money runs out, I wouldn’t be surprised if they reappeared in a Running Man-style reality show. If they manage to escape serving time behind bars perhaps they’ll end up serving it in front of the camera in a "fear factor" format.

On a serious and lighter note, I'm looking forward to the HNTDDD video and if anything comes to light from BBC Wales.

She could walk a careful line, I suppose, which offers a blend of partial truth and self-exonerating guff.

‘Yes, I did those terrible things, but I don’t remember much of that nightmarish time, I don’t remember stealing from my mother or my in-laws, or those credit cards, writing those letters, or anything about skipping bail, I just remember arriving at James’s door in London and fainting on his doorstep from lack of food… TSP was my desperate attempt to invent another, better self, someone who was a ‘pure soul’, who hadn’t stolen and forged and betrayed, and after a while, when an agent, then an editor, then so many readers believed it and liked it, I started to believe it myself. ‘Raynor Winn’ was the self I wished I was, the Jekyll to my Hyde, I wanted to keep being her, I NEEDED to keep being her, yadda yadda.’

Harder to know how she’d handle the TW illness angle, unless there is actually earlier evidence which suggested TW had CBD.

But she’d find a way.

To me the ‘funny turns’ seem anxiety/mental health related or simply orchestrated by MW to prove he had a problem. It’s unfortunate that the student Chloe managed to contact declined an interview.

No, I'm not Mauvish, I was The Time Traveller's Niece.

The AMA was great, I think it's very telling that no one approached Chloe to defend Raymoth. Also, why the hell would you tell everyone on your course that you were dying? Certainly you might let the other students know you had a condition that could affect your work or attendance, but dying? That's OTT attention seeking.

Has OC ever said what is in the handwritten letters? All the quotes came from the unsigned 'confession' letter. It seems strange to have mentioned their existence but not to have commented on their contents.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat and others. Here is the official entry form for 2019 CB prize, found as a .pdf on an archived page of the RSL site.

Seems to be open to interpretation with regard to whether "first published book" includes or excludes self-published. Evidently whomever CH spoke to chose their interpretation.

So it says clearly in blue and purple that it is ineligible. 2. e self-published books are ineligible.

She’ll find a way & not be held accountable for any of this. She will absolutely have to live with decent people knowing her true character.

No, that is meaning self published books are ineligible to enter the competition.

Also wasn't the book published by Gangani, registered as a company, does that count as self published?

Would HNTDDD be considered self published if you owned the company that published it? Do we know if Gangani actually published it or if they just set up the company and then self-published it themselves and claimed it was published by Gangani? (I suppose you would need a copy of the book for that?)
@freshsocks - crossover

I feel Sal got to them BEFORE the true extent of all this hit the press. To them, perhaps, it was all a smear campaign springing from jealousy (?) At least initially.

I wonder if other ‘first timers’ who HAVE self published did not submit as thought were not eligible?