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

I sometimes wonder why Sal feels the need to blatantly lie about even relatively insignificant stuff.

In the podcast below about Landlines (24.00) she tells the interviewer that she didn't take a notebook with her on the start of the CWT but only bought a notebook to write notes after she had walked quite some distance.

Yet she posted a photo of the kit she was taking on the walk on 18 May 2021 which clearly shows a notebook! So why does she do it? Is it a compulsive inability to tell the truth? I just don't know.

Just noticed that the boots here (which look like vivobarefoot...not cheap) are not the same boots she wears in this photo at the end of the Pennine Way. [I know she wrote something about ill-fitting boots but haven't read the specifics]. This led me to inspect Moth's boots. He wears big high top black ones to begin with, then by Fort William has brown ones that look new. Then he is wearing walking shoes in a photo with the bikes. He has different big black ones by the end of Offa's Dyke.

In LL, Moth did go and buy new boots in FW apparently

Interesting to reread the Marshwood Vale Magazine article which appeared in Sept 2020. In it Sal claims:

• When they moved to Haye Farm it had been vandalised with glue in the locks and no paint on the walls

• She still uses an 8 year old second hand phone that her daughter gave her in 2012!

• They were planning to make the first batches of cider that year

• Moth's health improved within a few days of starting the Iceland walk

• She was already planning another walk in the UK for the basis of her next book

The Wild Silence » Articles - Marshwood Vale Magazine

I said that about the boots too. In LL Moth orders army boots for them both and Ray doesn’t try hers on or wear them in before the walk, so that she can moan about how her feet are ravaged by blisters. The ones in that photo are Vivo Barefoot ones, super comfy and Not Cheap!!

I suspect she now lies automatically. She HAS to be spontaneous, poor, misfortunate or hard done by in some way; she cannot possibly plan anything or be well prepared, give or receive the benefit of doubt. She glumwashes her whole life- even Moth in TSP with that bit about how their sex life had dropped off and she thought he’d be getting special massages from the women at Grant’s house.

I'm not an expert but Sal seems to exhibit the classic symptoms of the Victim Personality. Maybe she lies in order to cast herself in the role of a victim.

The Victim Personality | Psychology Today

Something no one ever mentions because it’s not PC to comment on a woman’s figure, but it seems very strange to me that Salray’s body size has remained basically the same in all the photos since she walked the Salt Path/ SWC Path.
She was carrying a few pounds, but didn’t seem to ever lose weight despite the extreme walking/ calorie deprivation!

Maybe it’s not her specifically but the fabricated persona that is Raynor Winn? Sally Winn invented this person specifically to emotionally manipulate people and to cover up her tracks. Nobody would ever believe that sweet, scatterbrained, vulnerable, shy little Sally could steal thousands of pounds under your very nose.

Obviously she makes mistakes as is seen from the photos and heard in the interviews. Little details get forgotten. No, Raynor Winn must be the opposite of Sally Walker. The reader, the victim must believe that Ray/Sally is incompetent in some way and make allowances for her. Inventing herself as a perpetual victim does ensure a constant stream of sympathy, allowances and perks.

The ill-fitting boots in LL have to do an awful lot of work to keep us rooting for the plucky underdog Walkers, otherwise they’d risk just looking like what they were — rich retirees with the spare cash and leisure to go on a four-month walking holiday.

When they moved to Haye Farm it had been vandalised with glue in the locks and no paint on the walls

I’m still reeling from the Haye Farm episode of the podcast. I really can’t get my head around how they inspired such devotion in people like Bill Cole. It’s genuinely like that famous MN thread where someone suggested a rental property should just be given to the tenants, except Bill Cole seems to have actually wanted to do that! It’s as though Salray’n’Timoth had mesmerised him.

And the revelation that the whole Rick Stein programme was a put-up job and the cider they tasted (‘summer in a glass’!) had been made by the young couple…..! Well, that did it for me.

I’m not getting at Bill C as he seems like one of life’s exceptionally saintly people, but if there really was no point at which he started to think - hang on, am I being a tiny bit too generous to these people who aren’t actually running the farm, aren’t making cider and keep coming up with excuses for everything I suggest to help them get back on their feet?….well, he’s a better man than I am, Gunga Din, as the verse has it.

Re the film and its 'unflinching honesty' - I don't think films can be judged by the same markers as books. I've said before that screenwriting is very different to book narration, and a film is a different animal altogether. Where a book can have long passages of introspection and explanation, a film has to put everything out there visually. So stories naturally get adapted and altered otherwise many book-to-film adaptations would be incomprehensible. So I think we have to regard the film as a separate 'thing' distinct and discrete from the books. Even though Sal was involved in some executive capacity, I doubt she had much say in how the film was storylined, and I don't think we can blame her for the faults in the film.

We can, however, very much blame her for everything in the books.

As discussed on these threads previously, over the last 12 years, Sal's long distance walking has amounted to maybe 400 miles of the SWCP, 1,000 miles from Cape Wrath to Polruan, 60 miles in Iceland, 120 miles on the Thames Path and maybe 150 miles on the C2C. That averages out at less than half a mile a day! Apparently she doesn't do much daily walking or at least not many people in Cornwall have met her out on daily walks.

Somehow I doubt she has a gym membership, plays tennis, does team sports or is into gardening or pilates!

What I meant is that she should have been thin as a rake after walking the SWC Path! Someone did a calorie/ miles walked analysis re Moth and concluded he should have lost masses of weight. If you look at the photos of Sal on Skye after the wedding you will see she has a very small frame.

Should have been as thin as a rake, being the operative word....

Photo below is of Sal, halfway on the SWCP somewhere near Porthallow.

That is interesting for a few reasons. You can clearly see the sea. If it is near Porthallow then they stayed at the Fat Apples in the book - which is inland up the hill from the village. I can see she is wearing the dress from 2013 but we know they were in that area in 2015, when they met the Parsons.

Maybe they weren't walking the other way - they just didn't want Jo and David to see their car in the carpark. And then they went and pitched their tent with a view of the sea?

You have possibly tapped into the mystery of why RW deleted this photo from her IG. The caption said something like "a little over half way on the SWCP".

[ETA ... note the grey cardigan/top looks v similar to the one in the Fat Apples photo and it doesn't seem to feature in any of the earlier photos]

This is very valid, photos seem to show the more she has been a long distance walker - the more she has put on weight. It is backed up by Chloe's interview with Paddy Dillon re: calorie intake for a sustained walk.

I am still a fan of this writer's response, which was much shared many threads ago:

At the end of more than a thousand kilometres carrying considerable weight, my own body was not the same as when I began. I was skeletal, despite eating well

The Salt Path: a walk without a moral compass

I’m loving the idea of a version of the Walkers’ SWCP walk where their primary concern was striding off along the path, laden down by their packs, waving goodbye to someone they’d just met in a cafe (who was saying ‘Wow, those guys are hardcore!’) while trying to figure out how to circle back unseen to their vehicle in a nearby car park. 😀

With the BBC podcast and Chloe's bumper Q&A fest on Wednesday, it will be nearly 7 months since Sal and Tim have been seen in public. It is almost as if they have been living under house arrest.

It all begs the question, what now for Sal and Tim? Is her time as a well loved author hugging the limelight, definitively at an end?

Yes, that remains a comprehensively good piece of writing. I’d forgotten that was the essay that aptly compared SW’s prose style to Vogon poetry.

It sounds like Borderline Personality Disorder. She lies. She exhibits black and white 'splitting' behaviour in terms of her view of people and the world. She is dishonest, she steals, fears abandonment, is impulsive, and she struggles to show genuine remorse. It is one of the most difficult disorders to treat, apparently.

I wish they would just come out and confirm the times when they actually walked along TSWCP. To just give a truthful account would be nice. The Fat Apples opened in 2012. They either only visited once when she said they did in TSP or they visited more frequently especially with the book in mind and for some character research which is why we’ve got the Parsons in 2015 who have been just used as a bit of “interest” and authenticity.

I love the fact that interviews, Salray likes to come across as a bumbling technophobe or far too anti materialistic to bother with up to date tech. Obviously, an old phone doesn’t leave a digital imprint, so it’s quite clever to use that and it also ties in with the aforementioned hippie, off grid free spirits. Reality check. Tim’s vehicle, designer clothing for all, property in France, Aga etc etc.. 🤷🏼‍♀️ but of a conundrum. But Moth and Ray are simple folk.

The key thing, and possibly the next thing that will 'happen' to indicate which way the wind is blowing, will be whether PRH publish OWH or not.

They haven't had to do anything at all so far, other than a single statement defending their due diligence, and announcing the postponement of OWH, way back last July, but they will have to show their hand at some point over the next few months. Whether they publish it or not, it's a declaration either way.

Not that them not publishing would necessarily indicate an end to SW's writing career, of course. Perfectly possible for her to take some kind of partial, self-excusing mea culpa (The Salt Path: The True Story) to another publisher.

(Or even to take OWH elsewhere depending on the terms on which PRH chose not to publish, what's in her contract etc.)

It would be an interesting problem for her agent, to oversee her transition from the wispy, unworldly, Vogon poetry-spinning, all-round good egg 'Raynor Winn' to whatever she might choose to present herself as without that cosy, carefully-scripted persona.

I mean, given what seems to be her USP as a writer, across fiction and purported memoir, the 'pure soul' shtick -- if all possibility of that were removed, and that persona thoroughly exploded, could she still even write?

Her two sequels to TSP were written in the position of knowing she had a devoted readership who were delighted to hear more from her about someone they believed they knew, just as all her press and book events have involved 'soft', sympathetic questions which are essentially aimed at prompting her usual script for an existing fan base.

How would she deal with writing for a readership predisposed to doubt and criticise?