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

As regards colourful tales, he could give Brian Blessed a run for his money. (And as regards actual running, too, I expect.)

I'd also love to get to the bottom of the Dave and Julie question and had wondered too @DisappointedReader, about a possible family connection with SalRay & TimMoth.

I'm not as familiar with the Walker/Winn family tree/members as some of the OG Charabancers, but seem to recall TimMoth having several (three?) brothers, obviously including the one in France. SalRay, as I understand it, had just the one (now deceased) sister and no brothers, iirc? Probably unlikely, but worth consideration, perhaps...

I think it was on one of the podcasts that TW was the eldest of four brothers, which surprised me. I’m an eldest, and nothing about him says ‘eldest’ to me.

An interesting article even if news hasn't filtered through to the Times that OWH has been kicked further into the long grass from which it may never emerge.

The Salt Path wars are back — all publishers should be nervous

Interesting point from Caroline Sanderson of The Bookseller:

It sounds highly personal. But Sanderson moves on to a wider point. This is “one storm in one teacup”, she says, when what is at stake is the entire climate for non-fiction. Sales are down. Authors are struggling. Generative-AI is spitting out hallucinated non-facts and shoddy book “summaries” that compete directly with the originals. At this time, “we desperately need sources we can trust”.

I agree with sales being down. I was discussing sales with some of my fellow authors (we're all with the same publisher but this seems to be across the board) and many of us are finding sales are down by half to three quarters. It has hit incomes hard. The COL crisis means that people are waiting for books to go on offer and I must admit that I sell extremely well when my books (these are ebook sales) go down to 99p. Because people think that 99p is a fair price to pay for work that might have taken six months, apparently.

Sorry. Regular author moan over. Back to your scheduled programme.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoatdo authors benefit from libraries at all? Suddenly occured to me that you can't receive royalties every time someone takes out your book, is it just when the library buys the book for their collection? Possibly a silly question!

Yes, there's the Public Lending Right. All authors who are registered get a payment every year (in fact it's due in a couple of weeks). It's a small amount per book borrowed, but it mounts up if you've got a lot of books out. I mean, it's not a huge payment - I think mine is about £600 for last year, but some very popular authors can get quite a lot. Payment is capped at £6,600 though.

I can only dream.

I haven’t got the Spotify app. I may get it, just to listen to the podcast where Chloe mentions the charabanc but in case I forget, what did she say?
My thoughts on OWH being moved further into the future. Perhaps Penguin does want to disassociate from this author but hasn’t got the legal right to drop her in the same way that Walliams was dropped by his. They obviously know the content of the book, so it probably still reiterates the same Salt Path lies about circumstances and Moth’s “diagnosis” with Sally’s emotional blackmail to the reader in full swing. If it had any merit at all, they might have decided to release it as Richard Osman suggested.

It risks embarrassment at best & bringing PRH into disrepute at worst.

I don't have Spotify @HatStickBoots, I could listen just with adverts, but I couldn't fast forward or reverse, just listen straight through. I can't remember word for word what Chloe said, I think I did comment on it at the time, I was a bit disappointed that Chloe didn't know the name of the thread, or more that the thread had come into being because of her exposé, not because we were all disappointed after having read the book. But she was very enthusiastic about MN, and these threads, which she acknowledged as being useful to her.

Hmmm. I was less than impressed that the article's author described the £64k embezzlement as 'humdrum'. Although I do wholeheartedly agree with the general thrust, that truth matters. This is the simple fact that the 'who cares, I enjoyed the nice book' brigade fail to grasp.

Loose ends

Yesterday’s revelation that Penguin have postponed the publication of OWH by a further 15 months to 27 Jan 2028, seems like a line has been finally drawn in the sand surrounding the sorry saga of TSP. The penny seems to have finally dropped at PRH that the Raynor Winn brand is so severely tarnished that it should be consigned to the literary scrapheap.
Despite OC’s revelations there are still quite a few loose ends that are yet to be tied up. I’m not sure that many of them will but I’ve jotted down some random thoughts.

• Why did they choose to walk the SWCP?

I suspect that it had something to do with the fact that their son was studying at Newquay and could resupply them on route. Sal may have read 500-mile walkies in the dim and distant past, but I doubt very much that this was the chance impulse which was behind their decision to embark on the SWCP.

• How much of the SWCP did they walk in 2013?

I don’t know! I still find it difficult to correlate the descriptions of the SWCP in TSP with SA’s description of the same walk in Walking Away. There is very little mention of the exhausting ascents and descents that are a feature of this section of the SWCP. I suspect that they got a lift with their son from Newquay to St Ives and possibly on other sections of the walk as indicated by Polly.

• How much of the SWCP did they walk after 2013?

I suspect they did small sections in 2014 and 2015 (when they met the Parsons) as well as the Poole to West Bay section in 2016. There are no photos of the stretch between West Bay and Rame Head (150 miles) and there are a lot of Wikipedia type airdrops which make me wonder whether they walked all or any of this section.

• When did they stay in Polruan?

I suspect that it was from Sept 2016 and that they spent the first year of Moth’s course at the Eden project staying in student accommodation near St Austell. Did they meet Anna by chance and get an offer to stay in the flat in Polruan? I doubt it. I suspect they came across an advert and contacted her through official channels. The location of the meeting in the café doesn’t fit into the chronology of TSP which describes the stretch between Looe and Talland Bay in some detail.

• When did first they meet D&J?

I don’t think D&J are relatives of Raymoth – apart from Tim’s younger brother Martyn, his other siblings are namechecked at the end of TSP. I think it’s possible that Raymoth knew D&J before they walked from Poole to West Bay. Why? Firstly if you live near Lancaster, walking the stretch of the SWCP from Poole to West Bay on your two week annual holiday is a bit of strange choice, particularly when it includes the section around Portland Bill. Secondly, I think it’s possible that D&J took the photo of Raymoth standing next to the SWVP starting point sculpture at South Haven Point. I’ve no idea how they met – perhaps through acquaintances of their children, who knows?

• How much money did they have on their walk?

If Moth was getting PIP from 2014/2015, then it seems possible that for much of the walk they were getting substantially more than £30-48pw. This would explain how they could afford to pay for the ferries on the southern section of the SWCP between LE and Plymouth.

• How did they come up with the issue of homelessness?

Meeting the Parsons at the FAC in Aug 2015 may have provided the inspiration while the email to BI may have been part of a clever marketing campaign which put homelessness at the heart of the book.

• To what degree did they engineer the CBS/CBD diagnosis?

Impossible to be certain, but I suspect that the misinformation about Moth’s mother and the amount of walking they had done and planned to do, was part of a cynical attempt to engineer a diagnosis and that the tentative original diagnosis was then deliberately exaggerated and retrofitted into TSP for narrative effect.

• What role did Moth have in creating the content of the books?

All the anecdotal evidence suggests that Moth has a vivid imagination including fabricating tall stories about his sporting prowess and herding sheep with cats in Guatemala! Sport plays a role in TSP and LL (Moth listening to the 5th Ashes Test on the radio in TSP and the encounters in LL of people during the 2021 Euro Finals). The stuff about being mistaken for Sa, reading Beowulf, the encounter at Grant, meeting the man walking his tortoise at Lantic Bay, bumping into the woman near Porthcurno who knew John Le Carre/David Cornwell) all bear the hallmarks of Moth’s imagination. So I suspect that Moth played a very important role in fabricating and embellishing a lot of the anecdotes in TSP including the encounter at Heavenly End and the meeting with Kurt and his crew of weed smoking, surfing dudes.

• Is there any evidence to suggest that walking was a cure for Moth’s condition?

I don’t think there is any evidence to suggest it: the purported recovery in Moth’s condition takes place after 200 miles of the SWCP with the tent episode at Portheras Cove yet Sal describes a much more rapid recovery within days of the walk from Poole and on the Laugavegur trek. Polly’s house was apparently very near a major LDP yet they did no walking on it during the 18 months they stayed with her and nobody who lived near them at Haye Farm ever saw them walking on the footpaths around there. All very strange if walking is meant to be a miracle cure for CBD?

• How much of the LL walk did they do?

I have no idea but several descriptions of the walk on the CWT and PW don’t add up and the implied daily distances walked (up to 21 miles per day on the PW) seem highly unlikely even for a seasoned long-distance walker, which Raymoth clearly weren’t when they embarked on the LL walk. Moth could barely walk up the hill from Haye Farm according to Sal at the beginning of LL!

• What does HNTDDD tell us about their MO?

The plot of HNTDDD appears to be a thinly disguised attempt to target Cooper as the source of their misfortune and portray him as the arch villain of the book. He ends up apparently killing his wife! HNTDDD is effectively “payback” for the £100k loan that Raymoth obtained from Browne to repay the Hemmings. HNTDDD seems to be an act of revenge against a family member. The alleged thefts from Moth’s parents and Sal’s mother may be part of the same pattern of behaviour.

• What evidence is there to suggest that Raymoth are cynical emotional manipulators?

I think there is a huge amount – from the way they treated BC, family members and the Hemmings (all of whom trusted them implicitly and extended acts of generosity towards them) to the way that Sal was able to run rings rounds members of the media, PSPA, and GA/JI during the TSP filming. There are a lot of other anecdotes out there which suggest a cynical and very sinister level of emotional manipulation.

• What evidence is there that anybody ever shunned them as homeless tramps?

I don’t think there is any evidence to suggest that they were shunned by people they met on the walk and vilified as tramps any more than there is of Moth being genuinely mistaken for SA. A lot of these alleged incidents involve dogs doing unlikely things (sending Sal spinning outside a corner shop in Lynton/ knocking an ice cream cone out of somebody at Port Isaac where Moth is mistaken as SA for the umpteenth time), all of which make me wonder whether canine companions are subliminal signs in the narrative that Sal is telling porkies!

• Did any of the incidents described in TSP actually happen?

Yes they did! There is some evidence that Raymoth did go to Heavenly End, did meet Grant/WE at his house and have lasagne, meet somebody at the Tinner’s Arms in Zennor who was planning to go cycling in the Charente region of France, did meet Tadge at Treen, did meet a Polish waitress in Looe and did meet a Costa Rican café owner near Polruan. But a huge amount was embellished, or fabricated included a tortoise being walked in Lantic Bay and people falling off cliffs to their death taking selfies at St Alban’s Head NCI

• Is there any evidence of plagiarism in TSP?

The change of the title of TSP from LSB shortly after Sal had apparently been to see a performance of The Salt Road by Bagas Degol seems a strange coincidence. Anecdotes involving sunburnt noses and being described as tramps resemble some of the incidents described by Mark Walllington in 500-Mile Walkies

One final thought – a chap called Andy Ault and his partner Jo Hawes walked the entire SWCP in 2024 with his after they became homeless. He’s the real deal! It took them 297 days to complete the SWCP but unlike the Walkers they did walk the entire SWCP and yet, even though they were genuinely homeless that encountered repeated acts of generosity from strangers they encountered, including one lady who spontaneously thrust £250 into his partner’s pocket! Oh yes one final thing, they did pick up a copy of TSP which they read in the tent at night. Their verdict? Complete cobblers! Or in Andy’s words “we would just look at each other and laugh it was so obvious to us it was fiction”
'We trekked 630 miles along coastal path while homeless like Gillian Anderson's film' - Cornwall Live

I wonder if a lot of the content was Sal musing and monologuing about stuff that has subsequently been found to not be the case. For instance, if she's wandering the C2C in the snow and thinking about leaving poor Moth, how frail he was, how worried she is about his future health... which PRH can't, in all conscience, put out so soon after Moth being seen on the red carpet without so much as a walking stick.

So is it possible that the entire contents of OWH are called into question by the expose?

Interesting…Could it be a real smoking gun (?) and she can’t take the manuscript back…

I suspect that it's more that she's contradicted herself so much that she's forgotten what she's said and she's written stuff in OWH that is so contradictory to previous books that it's a load of old nonsense.

It was already through editing and into pre-production before OCs investigation showed up the flaws in Sal's story which made PRH look at OWH and think that it might be for the best if they pulled it for a while (or completely) and she rewrote it (or they just let it die, depending on how they feel about her now).

This a brilliant post. PLEASE forward to the best, relevant person at PRH & the Times journo - recentish article - who seems to believe Tim is genuinely, seriously, ill!

Dogs as motif & cropping up with tramps etc. Yes! These all feel very 1930s to me. Few, outside a rarefied dowager Duchess circle, now use the term for starters. Sal has a fondness for out of print books so my hunch is there are many borrowings we’ve not spotted. It feels like those at school who’d copy bits out of books & their own writing in between would let them down & it would all feel disjointed somehow.

HNTDDD! Please expand re: killing! How do you know this?

Surely PRH would question why SW did a two-week walk alone in winter when TW was seriously ill.

Sorry if missing something obvious, how do we know he was seriously ill.

I think that was the reason given in the blurb for OWH for Sal leaving Tim at home and doing the C2C alone.

I think PRH have brought a lot of this on themselves. It ought to have been obvious by LL that Sal didn't have any more books in her and was stringing out a wafer thin idea more and more just to fulfil her contract.

SW said this on the Muddy Stilletos site. I would have thought her agent and publisher might have said at some point that she shouldn't feel pressurised to do walks / meet any deadlines based on what she was saying about TW's health.

How did this walk come about? I know you’ve done other walks since the coast path, but why that particular crossing walk rather than one that circumnavigates?
When I first met Moth, I was a teenager. It was a long time ago, and I even now I can remember sitting in the college canteen having our very first conversation. The Coast to Coast walk had just been designated as a walk, you know, and Wainwright’s book had just appeared, and I can remember Moth talking about it. He was so excited, saying this will be a fantastic thing to do. I really want to do this thing. So our very first conversation was straight into this. We really wanted to do it throughout our life together; it was something we were always going to do together, but then a downturn in his health meant we didn’t do it. So I ended up doing it alone.

Hwaet! Afternoon fellow charabancers. I have been on an epic 30 page catch-up after a mad week at work where every single deadline seemed to converge. Joy unconfined now I'm back with you all. Sorry to hear about @DisappointedReader's and @Uricon2's trials and hope things are much much better for you both now.

Excellent AMA/webchat with OC and some more detail filled in, so really interesting. I'm not surprised that SA doesn't want to engage in any discussion about how he's been used in TSP. He must be cross he's been associated with them through no fault of his own and I imagine he doesn't want to add to any such link by commenting.

Some other thoughts on the various conversation strands over the past week: I'm not at all surprised that OWH has effectively been postponed indefinitely. I saw the Times story yesterday and raised an eyebrow as it wasn't anything more than an opportunity to rehash the scandal by means of a tenuous link to PRH's website. I wonder if that was the tipping point to bump the release date even further (and thank you to whoever spotted it's 2028 now as the date; like others I'd assumed that was 'next year') - as we've speculated here, any time a new book comes out, the whole history of grift will be reprinted. Possibly not the PR that's wanted.

I'm also not surprised that a big money interview was offered to SW. Rival papers do that all the time. Only last year after the Strictly revelations, one paper has Giovanni and one had signed up Amanda A, and were having a merry old time printing their different versions of events. I think an interview would be the sort of disastrous car-crash that was seen when Capt Tom's daughter & DH did their Piers Morgan interview. Similar grift/inability to apologise there too IMO. So I'm not surprised SW didn't do it, but also not surprised that someone popped up on the AMA thread wanging on about 'bullying'. I suspect she or someone close to her has been watching these threads since the start, and every now and again just can't resist another 'but you're all meanies' post.

PS the Rovering Correspondent is doing v well on his (extensive) drug regime and is bouncing about the place as if he were 5 years younger.

And I think someone ages ago pointed out that timeline was nonsense too @SaltyTea (hello btw and nice to meet you) given when Wainwright was published and the ages of SW & TW. I now work on the basis that whatever she says is glumwashed embellished bollox. If she told me it was raining, I'd look out of the window etc etc

It seems they mapped out their entire future after that Mars bar-dipping event!
You beat me to it about the Wainwright book @TonstantWeader . It’s good to see you back and with such great news about your Rover!

Re: Spotify…. I didn’t know there was any other version than the app? What am I missing?

Great points, I think she may be tempted into an interview yet…