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

And @SaltyTea a welcome to the charabanc from me too.

Remember that the Abersoch White House Hotel was acquired by Doug Barrowman of PPE Medpro Covid procurement/Baroness Mone infamy....

Ooo interesting, shifty and shiftier...

Re: the video I shared this morning, on pp 26, or 27 of this thread, Sal is interviewed and gives some shocking views. I am used to her saying that Tim's health improved when he was walking every day but she also maintains when "living on that really strict diet". So cheap noodles, fudge bars and chips improve a terminal illness?

Near the end of the interview, she talks a lot about listening to our bodies. And her conclusion is "we prematurely age ourselves in a lot of ways". Yes well you prematurely 'aged' your husband in your writing, Sal, you repeated that he would be dead 10 years ago. It is very manipulative.

Yes, I fully agree with you about Derek Tangye and Simon Armitage. Thank you for sharing your personal connections too.

Sal has no sense of place as it’s all a cobbled together hotch potch over an expanded time line mostly from a comfortable, heated room.

This dialogue and the scenes themselves have been carefully constructed to enable her to show the feelings she might repress. Tim would be angry if people thought he was a heartless git and Sally would never say so… but the characters she invents just might

A very astute observation @HatStickBoots 👏

Hi @SaltyTea, I'm glad you decided to partake of the fudge, the more the merrier :)

I still can't get my head around these health claims not being questioned, I can't remember who shared the post with the documentary link, to the woman who was selling non existent holidays. When things got tough she pretended to have cancer, the police made her take her headscarf off, they didn't just let her continue to make that claim. Maybe this isn't as black and white, but it is so grey, no way could Salray have believed Moth was dying, and especially not in 2013, he hadn't even seen the neurologist. There is a big difference between having something wrong with mild symptoms and being terminally ill. In the order of lying that I shared a while ago, my late nan would have called this a wicked lie.

It’s interesting. I think she doesn’t feel rooted anywhere. She likens herself to the wild animals and the elements and in all of her writing, writes as though she offers herself up, to be taken by them. The wind, the sea, the land. It was actually those thoughts that I felt a connection with BC… but AC, they make me feel sad, as though she didn’t really mean those things.

I think the fact the Times etc haven't pointed out timeline anomalies on neurologist part of the issue. The public largely unaware. Most don’t look too deeply & assume letters prove serious & even terminal illness.

Regarding “place” and the comments above, there’s a comment on her Instagram about the Welsh hills being as imprinted on her as a red dragon through a stick of rock. It’s like she wants to belong everywhere and anywhere. As I think Uricon said, “any walk will do” - any place will do. Wherever Sal lays her Moth (lol) that’s her home…

This is what I thought from the start- she’s desperate to keep him and he’s less bothered about her. I think she’s unusually immature, possibly he is her only boyfriend, and I think she despises feminists because she has a lot of internalised misogyny. She’s a proper ‘stand by your man’ woman… and I think he must also have some weakness or skeleton that means they are tied together. Maybe simply that she arranges the world so that he can be special, not have to do work that he doesn’t want to, and still drive brand new Landrovers while wearing cravates, moleskins, and natty waistcoats.

I don’t think either of them are that clever really. I don’t think their conversation would be very interesting- unlike yours, @Freshsocks

Ok, I found another link to the podcast with Chloe that I mentioned a few pages ago. She says lovely things about the Charabanc!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0MMGv40iXJczFGV46yR0zJ

You are kind to say that@AlertCat, I find your posts very interesting :)
I think you have summed up their relationship, Salray is enabling Tim to be, as you say special.

Everyone who has posted (with one or two dishonourable mentions) has brought life, interest, integrity, intelligence, thoughtfulness and critical thinking to the thread and the facts, and that’s why we are still here, what is it- 24 threads in now?? It’s not the subject in and of itself, it’s the level of discussion that people have brought to the topic. And some, like yourself, actually gone out and done sleuthing, contributing facts as well as fascinating commentary. Thank you to all of you 💐

I don’t believe the family were allowed to stay at the Abersoch hotel “for free”. Possibly they stayed without paying…
I just think even in the early 00’s small businesses weren’t doing so well as to give away free rooms! A generous off season/midweek staff discount, yes. Either way there’s a cost in utilities and maid services, it would cost the hotel money to have people there.
Also this is the recollection of the niece, probably a child or young person at the time, not the grown up involved in booking.

This may have been why Sal was asked to leave! As OC suspects. Could she have smuggled family in?

Those are such lovely sentiments @AlertCat, I agree with all you have said, I don't think any of us would still be on this charabanc without @DisappointedReader, who I hope is alright. I know there's lots of fudge and cider, but it isn't just that, it's as you say, the other passengers :)

I don’t know, more like fiddled the books and gave them their money back I’d guess…
or perhaps they did get it free because it was the last time they’d ever get to see Tim

Books, you’re right, probably the better shout, or a combo of things in the end if so.

I realise it’s a bit late to be revealing this absolute bombshell, but in my family there’s someone who lives in a house with a very large external building where they built charabancs.

Sadly the business folded c. 1930, otherwise I might have been able to explore getting preferential rates…

I think it might be terribly interesting., but that’s primarily because I wonder what on earth the Bonnie and Clyde of literary-medical scams actually say to one another behind the scenes.

‘Damn, I can’t believe that cow told a journalist I quit the fleecewrapping job. Pass the marmalade’?

‘You’re going to have to go on a diet to look more fragile.’

‘I keep seeing missed calls from my editor.’

’At least we still have Big Dave and Julie.’

Re: OWH
I was musing why the Telegraph and Times had picked up on it at around the same time. Another possible link, I made, was the question in the AMA very much looking forward to the publication of OWH - phrased in a challenging way with a username in a similar vein to h. kindness.

Well, I'm looking forward to it, or, equally, to it being pulled, because I imagine that will be the next (or possibly last?) thing that 'happens' in this mad saga, and will probably determine a lot, like whether PRH thinks the brand is too damaged for it to sell, and/or might involve reputational damage to their brand given the cumulative effect of the Observer revelations, or whether we see SW engaging in some performative (and probably self-exonerating) partial mea culpa, or not doing any publicity at all, or whether PRH announce the book won't be being published, or just quietly shelve it etc. And, obviously, what form OWH will take, if it is published, as it's impossible to imagine (well, to me, anyway) that it will simply be whatever was going to appear in 2025, as though CH had never gone to poke around in Pwllheli or met a woman with a plastic folder in a motorway service station...

I think that for me it's interesting because both PRH and SW have to act, whether it's by doing something or not doing something (which is in itself an action). The status quo can't continue indefinitely. The book either appears or it doesn't. (And if it's postponed again, that's also significant.) And if it appears it has to either continue with the thoroughly discredited brand or do something different, which will further draw attention to how discredited the brand is.

Though I don't know either why the Times and Telegraph both seem to have picked up on an old fact at around the same time.

Writing from my usual state of suspicion (in all matters Brand Raynor Winn) - I had conjured up the vivid image of the very long twin tentacles of the giant squid at play. They grasp and hold on to their prey very efficiently - and certainly would be damp.