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

Your starter for 10 - where is Moth in the photo below and what is he doing? (He is not trigplanking on Dartmoor!)

The photo was posted on RW's IG Feed on 21 Dec 2024 and celebrates the Midwinter Solstice. I had kind of assumed that it was somewhere in Cornwall, but not a bit of it!

It's taken outside the Bjarnahofn Shark Museum in Iceland where you can go and sample such delicacies as Hakari, fermented shark which is very popular in Iceland apparently. It's probably not a great advert for your ecology credentials though and probably wouldn't go down well with the likes of David Attenborough.

As the photo appears to have been taken in winter, I suspect it was taken during Tim and Sal's walking holiday to Iceland in Feb 2017. Unsurprisingly the detour to an Icelandic shark museum doesn't figure prominently in interviews Sal has given over the years.

The Feb 2017 trip to Iceland is an interesting point in Sal and Tim's life:

• Tim was at the Eden project halfway through his 3 year HND course in sustainable garden design
• Sal was writing TSP but didn't send her email to the BI until May 2017
• So why did they suddenly decide to go to Iceland on holiday?
• How did they afford it?
• why did they never mention this trip when they returned to Iceland to walk the Laugavegur trek with D&J?
• did the 2017 trip provide the inspiration for the Laugavegur trek and TWS?
• what did they actually do on the trip. Moth isn't carrying any backpacking gear at the shark museum and is wearing jeans, so maybe they just took buses to local tourist spots and did very little walking

For somebody who supposedly struggled to put his coat on before heading off on the SWCP in Aug 2013, Moth has displayed remarkable feats of agility over the years!

An able bodied man would be proud of such feats let alone somebody allegedly suffering from CBD! The guy is a complete con artist.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film

Reposting the link as @DisappointedReader has decreed.😍

A question. The WW's went to ground after the first article in the Observer in July. Apart from the rebuttal, they made no public appearances. Can't think how isolated they must feel (self inflicted but still, others have done worse with less criticism ..thinking COVID). If OWH was delayed to protect their mental health, publishing it at all will only stir things up again! Just shows how it's all about money.

One final post from me on Moth's agility.

The photo of Moth standing on one of the entrance gates to Glenthorne House was taken on day 3 of the walk, just beyond Culbone church. In TSP Sal describes Tim on that day as "tiring and finding every step a struggle".

Yet later the same day he has managed to get onto the stone wall and balance against the statue outside the entrance gates of Glenthorne House. However, Moth's miraculous recovery from CBD wasn't meant to happen until 200 miles later at Portheras Cove.

In the same section of the walk just past Culbone Church Sal says: we were homeless and Moth was dying.

There is no mention of Glenthorne House in TSP or Moth's feat of agility.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sal deleted this photo from her IG feed after OC's story broke in the Observer.....

The photo of TW on the trigpoint always fills me with irrational rage, I think because he looks like a performing seal about to catch a fish and clap his flippers, and is terribly pleased with himself.

And the Glenthorne House one looks like he’s levitating. Probably borne aloft by SW’s adulation. Or hot air is also possible.

One random thought occurred to me after listening to episode 5 (The French Quarter) of OC's podcast yesterday.

Sal's niece, Cecile, recounts her grandmother telling her that Sal went and hid in a cupboard to avoid being confronted about the allegation that she had stolen £25K from Tim's parents' building society account.

I wonder whether this incident provided the inspiration for the opening scene in TSP where Sal and Tim are hiding like frightened mice in the cupboard beneath the stairs as the bailiffs hammer on the door at 9am.

We know from the neighbouring farmer that this didn't happen as he saw them do a flit at 2am and they had left Pen-y-maes by the time the bailiffs arrived at 9am the next morning.

If Sal did hide in a cupboard to avoid being confronted by Tim's parents, and used it in TSP to emotionally hook readers in the first few pages then it would be highly ironic - she would have effectively turned a scene where she was the perpetrator of a crime into one where she was the victim of circumstances beyond her control as she and Tim were evicted from Pen-y-maes

To continue this theme - to go back a bit to Porlock. I have always found it disturbing the way Sal trivialises a degenerative neurological condition in this way:

We climbed away from Porlock Weir and up into the woods. Moth was tiring and finding every step a struggle. I was leaden and achy. It could have been our lack of fitness, the emotional exhaustion, the CBD, or maybe it was just the chips.

But, I remember a photo shared of Tim posing up on the wall at Porlock, as well. Because I quipped that he wouldn't be the first person from Porlock to undermine a work of literature.

And yet Sal chose to make these photos public! Photos that negate the CBD death's door narrative. Either brazen or idiotic, or both.

Brazen with an inability to think through the consequences of their deception.

Perpetrators are often highly skilled at manipulation but poor in other forms of psychological insight.

Gosh… absolutely spot on, Adrian Searle!
The photos posted in 2024, was Sal using them to portray the current Moth at that time? They went there in 2017 before she’d written the Salt Path and four years after she had claimed Moth was diagnosed with CBD?

The only thing Moth’s “dying” of is laughter.

I'm not far off Moth's age (I think he's a year or so younger than me), exercise regularly and do a fair bit of plank work. I would struggle to perform such a complete plank as Moth does on the trig, whilst apparently suffering so badly from his 'terminal illness'. His fitness and core strength don't show much sign of deterioration, for all Sal's whingeing on about his limping and slow pace and leg dragging...

And I wonder whether their leaving BCs place was driven by panic? Tim had said he was dying - maybe to close BC down, on the spur of the moment, and then there surely must have been some sharp intakes of breath on behalf of Sal when she realised that they'd told the wrong lie to the wrong person - someone who was in a prime position to realise that Tim hadn't died? So they packed and ran without considering what to do next, simply to stop being found out?

They do seem to have a pattern of being unable to think through consequences which, if they’d taken some basic pains or even just thought about them, would have meant their Bonnie and Clyde style career in crime would have been far easier. (And CH’s job far harder!)

Everything from SW not appearing to recognise that stealing a cash deposit she was supposed to be making was going to draw immediate attention when not available to pay staff wages (something she’d have known as bookkeeper!), to recognising that they could probably have stayed at Anne’s for longer if they’d helped out around the farm, got even very PT jobs and made even token efforts at restarting their lives, to not thinking through the ramifications of telling BC TW was dying fast at the same time as publishing a book claiming he’d had a miracle cure.

Not to mention writing a roman à clef that explicitly recounts SW’s thefts, confession letters that do the same, unnecessary falsifications of identifiable people and places in TSP, unnecessarily pissing off benefactors like BC by not doing the little he’d contracted them to do and not paying the utilities or breaking their tenancy more considerately etc etc.

I suppose the most obvious thing is not appearing to have made even token attempts to repay any of the family thefts.

I was just musing about whether BC, ‘Cecile’ or ‘Anne’, or the other family members who took part in the documentary or podcast, or spoke privately to CH to corroborate things, would have been so likely to cooperate with her investigation if the Walkers had repaid family with early proceeds from TSP, or, after the deaths of the victims, had contacted other family members to say ‘We now have money to repay this sum — could you advise on what we should do? Obviously we’re terribly sorry we couldn’t repay x during their lifetime, but we’re trying to make recompense. If we don’t hear from you, we’re going to donate X sum to Charity Y in their name.’

Or whether BC would have been less likely to cooperate with CH if the Walkers had done their job on his farm, or even let him buy in help, or didn’t drop out of their tenancy with a brief, ungracious email and left him to untangle a mess of unpaid utility bills.

The stupid SM photos that contradict key aspects of the fictional ‘memoirs’ are another aspect.

The above theme that is being discussed reminds of a quote, originally shared by @Uricon2 :
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

@RueMouffetard I agree. I wondered earlier what exactly Sal thought was going to happen when she pocketed the money she was supposed to be banking that was needed the next day to pay wages... I mean, it would be SO obvious that she took it and she didn't even seem to have a 'mistakes were made' response ready!

Lack of planning and spur of the moment stupid decisions seem to be a marker of these two. Did they not think that we'd notice Tim still being alive?

I would substitute selfish for careless. SW and TW have consistently put their own, often excessive needs, above those of others.

Did they not think that we'd notice Tim still being alive?

But the remarkable fact is that no one did. I remember in June 2025 studiously avoiding going to my usual cinema. All the, usually, interesting indy local cinemas had wall to wall coverage of the TSP film Sal was being constantly interviewed and asked to recommend walks and sights along the SWCP. There was not a glimmer of anything except about how great it all was.

I thought it was just me but then mentioned it to a friend who agreed. Then the cinemas had extra showings because it was sold out on the other nights. I resisted sending a message to the friend, who was abroad, saying she was lucky she was missing it.

Then a relative asked me what TSP was about and I said the basics, because that's all I knew, and then said that the husband was "still with us". And I felt mean and I must be a spiteful cynic.

In early July an article was published by Chloe Hadjimatheou.

I'd guess Sal's response to Tim's continued existence would be 'walking keeps him alive.' Which really calls into question the professionalism and qualifications of those who told her he was 'terminally ill' before they walked TSP, doesn't it?

Snort re TW’s inconveniently noticeable aliveness. 😀

It’s kind of like a lack of theory of mind.

I mean, to an extent I can appreciate that a debut author at some level struggles to believe that people are actually going to read her book. It seems deeply unlikely that something you wrote at your kitchen table is going to go out into the world and be read. SW is always blustering in interviews about how terribly taken aback she was to find she ‘was expected to do PR’ for TSP. Certainly she could never have predicted its success. (Though surely the dimmest individual would have realised that ‘Anne’, to whom SW had every reason to feel grateful, was likely to find out at some point that her aunt had published a book depicting her as an exploitative, privileged slave driver!)

And no one using their brain would have responded to TSP’s success by augmenting the much more guarded health claims of the book (where CBD is not definitively diagnosed) with increasingly extravagant claims for TW’s miracle cure in interviews, still less by continuing the fiction in two subsequent books.

And by LL she was comparatively experienced. There’s no excuse for apparently not grasping that BC, who came into their lives first as a fan of SW’s writing, was going to read LL and notice that what TW had told him about his imminent death and the contemporaneous ‘Christmas tree’ DAT scan conclusion to LL couldn’t both be true.

@RueMouffetard Exactly! I can also just about buy TSP, when she wouldn't have expected such a runaway success. But the subsequent books are where she should have dialled back the CBD ('possible misdiagnosis, feel so silly, he's ill but he's not THAT ill, so lucky and relieved to find he's still going to be with me..' etc etc). And also possibly have gone a little more into 'mistakes were made' and then we could have seen 'amends being made'.

But I stick to my opinion that Sal only had the one book in her and she's had to cobble together a boat from fluff to try to row onwards.

Here's my thought for the day - life is full of "what ifs?" and this sad story is no exception.
Whilst I don't have any easy answers, here's a few :-
What if SW had banked the £600 cash payment correctly - in the Hemmings business account? (Was that enough to cover the wages?)
What if TSP had not become a best-seller?
What if SW as RW had, by some excuse, managed to turn down requests to be interviewed, appear at book festivals etc. etc.
What if SW had seen the red light and contented herself with TSP? (even before the truth emerged, I found the sequel TWS a struggle to get to the end. Had my finger in the Iceland map and kept thinking "how much longer?".

I think that if SW had resisted swiping the £600 cash, she would possibly have managed to keep embezzling money from the Hemmingses for much longer, potentially.

But as they don't seem to have been using the money to pay off the loan against the house, I suppose it would have been repossessed anyway?

If TSP hadn't become a bestseller, and had only sold the small numbers that might be expected from a debut memoirist, I suppose it's possible I still might have been given a copy, and thought 'Hmm -- weird' about the lightly sketched court case and googled, and noted that not only was there nothing on line about any court proceedings involving Raynor Winn, she didn't appear to exist before the publication of TSP, but, for the absence of evidence, I couldn't have gone further, and would have put it out of my mind permanently.

And I'd never have known other people had the same response, or thought it was a deeply odd piece of writing, with all that ill-concealed ire aimed at other people.

If it hadn't been a bestseller, it's possible it wouldn't have come to the attention of whoever alerted CH to things not being all they seemed.

And even if the same person did alert CH, I doubt she would have thought there was enough of a public interest angle to merit publication if the book was an obscure one.

I think RW's omnipresence in the media, at book festivals etc probably did something to help it to bestseller status via word of mouth (as, obviously, did PRH's big publicity push), but I definitely also think that the fact that the media and her readership apparently accepted uncritically the claim that walking improved TW's condition probably did a lot towards encouraging SW to turn the tentative diagnosis and improvement in TSP into claims that he definitely had CBD and that the SWCP definitely cured it magically. It 'hardened' her story and made it much more miraculous, and she leaned into that in the sequels, as well as into her new identity as salt-stained, mystic sage of the coast in Arvon teaching, Gigspanner etc.

If she'd largely avoided doing publicity, or did the minimum required contractually, it's possible TSP wouldn't have been a bestseller, and that she wouldn't have walked herself into a situation where she'd leaned into the 'miracle cure' narrative. Which, when she wrote the sequels, she appears to have thought she needed to lean into still further.

If there was only the text of TSP, without the interviews and sequels, I think she could have defended herself against the allegations that she'd made false claims about TW's health by saying 'Look, I'm quite clear in the book that the consultant said CBD could only be diagnosed at post-mortem, so yes, it's perfectly possible he doesn't have it. I'm not a medic, and was going with the information we were given at the time.'

Which would have made the 'TSP was just a capsule of our life, not all of our life' defence more compelling as well.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-thread-25-to-feel-disappointed-and-disgusted-and-vindicated-now-too-after-reading-this-in-the-observer-about-the-author-and-her-husband-from-the-salt-path-book-and-film

I think we can say with confidence that @DisappointedReader has never been unreasonable. Hold on tight - there is a fresh breeze from the east-south-east ,,,,