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]

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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?
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

Hi all, I haven’t posted on any of the threads before but I’m mightily impressed that you have 24 pages worth of discussion points!

I have limited experience with TSP other than I saw the film on a whim when I fancied going to the cinema and it was the only film showing.

Hadn’t read nor never heard of the book but I found the film miserable and boring and Raynor Winn’s ‘character’ very unlikeable - it was just moan moan moan, plod plod plod. Anyway I left the film thinking wow that’s 2 hours of my life I’ll never get back. Then we find out not long after than she is nothing but a shyster and a grifter!

So have been following news etc (thought podcast was fab!) but I have ZERO desire to read any of the books (except perhaps HNTDDR out of curiosity) as I find her so offputting - even more so after hearing her read excerpts from the books on the podcast. I just feel like her tone and character must come through so strongly I’d want to pull my own ears off.

Anyway just thought it was an interesting observation that her character is so odious that it somehow managed to carry through both book and film adaptation.

…and the name - or nom-de-plume - of the author of HNTDDD comprises an adjusted spelling of TSP’s author’s maiden name, double-barrelled with their eldest’s middle name and (stretching it here), possibly a creative manipulation of the second syllable of their youngest’s first name!

Hi, good to hear from you. That’s an interesting viewpoint. I actually liked the film and the actors’ portrayals. Gillian Anderson is the version of Raynor Winn that Sally Walker could die for. We know now that Sally Walker and Raynor Winn are vastly different in character although you get the odd Freudian slip coming through and you can see evidence of the author’s personality. ‘Raynor’ and the ‘miserable’ back story allows the reader to make concessions for the negative aspects of the character. At least, that’s how I was affected at the time.

Interestingly, "Gone to Earth" is also the title of a melodramatic 1917 novel by Mary Webb, about an 'innocent child of nature' victim heroine.....

I just looked it up and it's one of the first batch of Penguin books published (in 1935). Also features a Welsh gypsy 😉 Perhaps SalRay has a copy?

She could have done. The 'first ten Penguins' were republished by Penguin as a '50 years of Penguin' commemorative boxed set in 1985, which sold well at the time and brought Gone to Earth to an 80s audience.

I’ve just watched the latest 'The Rest is Entertainment' podcast where someone asks Osman whether TSP sales spiked after CH’s exposé. Apparently not. He then shares some snippets: a friend or acquaintance of his knows Moth who is “very nice” 🙄 (probably JI). There are also a few remarks about PRH's take on it all which I found interesting given Osman’s position in the publishing world. It’s in the episode called 'The Secret PR War Over Graham Norton’s Sofa' about fifteen minutes in.

Re the tent in the flat in Polruan - it was in the living room (apparently!)

In order to sleep at night, she pitched their tent inside the flat, on the sitting room floor. She was only able to fall asleep when she was ‘safe’ inside it. Moth lay outside it, in the opposite corner of the room, on a mattress on the floor.

An interesting detail in the Daily Telegraph interview in 2022, Sal specifically claims that people assumed they had been made homeless through addiction.

They pitched their tent on cliff edges and in fields, ate 10p packs of noodles, fought off the elements and the judgments of others, (many of them making knee-jerk assumptions that the couple must have made themselves homeless through addiction).

Although in an interview with the Guardian, the tent they slept in at the flat at Polruan had shifted to their bedroom!

When the opportunity of a roof eventually arose, in Polruan, they took it, gratefully. It wasn’t always an easy transition; for a couple of weeks, they had the tent up in the bedroom and slept in it

Article in Private Eye this week about the upcoming BBC Salt Path podcast!

SPOILER ROTTEN
A BBC Wales podcast series about the Salt Path controversy has stomped over the ground cultivated by the Observer hack behind the scoop.

Did RW say it was a 1 bedroom or 2 bedroom flat?

1 bedroom

Raynor Winn talks to me from their one-bedroom flat in Fowey; it doesn't have sea views, she tells me, but it has a ceiling, and walls

The Salt Path: One woman's journey walking the entire South West Coast Path after becoming homeless | The Independent | The Independent

I’m pretty sure she refers to ‘the bedroom’ throughout the Polruan flat scenes.

Because she also makes it sound rather bare and grim, apart from having a stained glass window. She describes the flat as narrow and dark, there are rats in the ivy of the access alley wall, and they seem to be sleeping on a mattress on the floor not a bed.

ETA Which of course does not mean it wasn’t in reality a comfortable, well-furnished flat!

Plans available on Cornwall planning portal show it has 2 bedrooms.

Being fair though, perhaps they used one bedroom as an office/writing room and therefore only considered it as a 'one bedroom flat'.

Stop being fair!

I'm sorry! I am cursed with the Devil's Avocado!

“Observer hack”? That sounds really offensive? I’m not sure how to interpret this. I’ll see if I can buy a copy.

According to her portrayal in TWS, Moth wanted to sleep on the bed and was quite happy to lie on a proper mattress. I imagine those inflatable ones would have been very uncomfortable to get on and off, like a hammock.

Maybe when you glumwash really, really hard, it can make your extra bedroom disappear?

(Though this reminds me of a question for UK people — at the start of TWS, just before she pitches the tent indoors, SW makes tea and brings it to the sleeping TW, with ‘two Rich Tea biscuits’, which she says is their usual start to the day.

Is this a culturally usual thing to do, to eat biscuits with your early morning tea in bed? Or is the implication that he’s ill, possibly struggles to get up, so needs some calories and sugar beforehand?

(I find Rich Tea depressing, and not worth potential crumbs in the sheets.)

See, I think she means that the ‘bed’ is a mattress on the floor, not a proper bed. I think she says ‘mattress’, rather than bed, and TW definitely says he wants to keep sleeping on the mattress, because he’s hot used to the comfort.

A cup of tea and a couple of plain biscuits - anytime of the day. British, Traditional.

How did anyone believe this fairy tale in the first place? We've lost our home and husband has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Let's go on a gruelling long distance walk over rough terrain. Did they even do the walk?

Your first q. - my answer would be : I have no idea, that is why I've read all these Threads.
Your second q. - a. : only a part of it, with family help.

This is a great way of listening to the story:
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer