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?

[DisappointedReader]

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 24 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?

After 24,000 posts there are still recent, new and up-and-coming things to look out for on the path.
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:

• 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
• Ask Me Anything thread MNHQ here: AMA with award winning investigative journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou, Weds 28th Jan, 7-9pm | Mumsnet

Up-and-coming:

• Our Chloe's short video about Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's first book How not to Dal dy Dir - date to be confirmed.
• BBC Podcast - date to be confirmed

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. The Observer's new podcast series The Walkers (link above) covers most things.
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 7 months we have done amazingly well together for 24 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.

If you are posting about a podcast, please start your post with the episode number you are commenting on, for clarity and to help others avoid spoilers if they wish to do so. Many thanks.

After listening to The Walkers: The real Salt Path podcast episodes from The Observer my thoughts are even more with the Walker/Winns' victims. I also believe that the publishers, agent and prizegivers must now act and be seen to act.

As we enter our quarter century thread riding the community charabanc, as always keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 24 IS FULL 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? | Mumsnet

The last statement is an insult to their customers and continues to peddle Raynor Winn as a victim. It seems they don’t want to make any statement at all that is a lie or shoots themselves in the foot by telling the truth which they haven’t got the guts to do. I’m sure they can allow for the loss of this one author! Are they that greedy and stupid or so bound up by lawyers that they’re completely stifled? Their silence is all they can do and it’s pathetic!

I don't think we can bring the children into it. Yes, they might have known what was going on but, as many of us can attest, trying to get parents to change their mind when they are dead set on a course of action is usually beyond the abilities of offspring.

They might heartily disapprove of their parents' actions (while still getting some benefit from them). They might have aided and abetted. They might have been behind the whole thing. But we can't know and they should be considered (mostly) innocent in my view; after all they didn't write the books, they didn't tell the lies, their main crime lies in staying quiet. And it's their mum and dad, after all...

I agree. We simply don't know anything, really, about what they knew and when, to what extent they may have benefited from the scam, what their relationship with their parents is like etc. And yes, ultimately, they didn't steal the money, perpetrate the scam, or write the books.

Or indeed perpetrate crimes against folk music via what @Uricon2 has memorably termed 'menacing whispering, shuffling and the Dr StrangeRay lab coat'.

If anything they are probably mortified by the whole thing. But quite right to keep them out of it (i only responded to someone's query) nothing is public to suggest they have any involvement.

Thanks @SaltyTea I have not seen this anywhere. This is the link below - it doesn't say it is for subscribers but as I currently am then I might not see that - I hope that can be accessed. I can't imagine there will be anything new but questions can be put and it is only digital this time. I even got the confirmation email with the link - last time I was dependent on @Anythingbutheadlands

The Walkers: Behind the Scenes with Chloe Hadjimatheou | The Observer

Interesting to listen to the interview with Cathy Rentzenbrink for Emmaus Cornwall when Sal talks about being mistaken for SA (23.00-25.50) She claims that it was an easy mistake for people to make when two middle aged people appeared with backpacks and the same coloured hat on.

Although SA has a lot to say about his hat in Walking Away, at the time of the walk in 2013, nobody could have known that he was wearing any type of hat because he appears hatless in the publicity photos en route and he only talks about the hat in the book which came out in 2015. That suggests to me that Sal must have read Walking Away when in came out in 2015 and then decided to invent the running gag about Moth being mistaken for SA

The scale of Sal's lying is also off the chart in this interview where she talks about entering villages where a group of old ladies would say 'Simon you are here early, come and have a cup of tea and the next village there would be another group of old ladies who would say Simon you are here early, nudge nudge wink wink say no more, but come in and have some cake anyway

Walking Away by Simon Armitage review – the South West Coast Path with a fine comic guide | Simon Armitage | The Guardian

Moth being mistaken for SA!

I'm not sure she reads very much, not joking - she might have just seen this promotional montage from SA's publisher. Look out for about the 7th frame - after Culbone Church:

Bing Videos

Yes you could be right! There is also a busker (3.29).... Maybe that inspired the Beowulf reading in St Ives.

@ThompsonTwin The scale of Sal's lying is also off the chart in this interview
Thank you for the Emmaus video above. You're telling me! I picked up on another section, from 30.45, where she is completely reversing the truth. It is really upsetting as she is elaborating on how people treated them badly when the opposite is true. She is deeply unpleasant, I'm very sorry to say.

You are probably right @BrandyAndLovage, I don't think Sally reads that much, but she wouldn't have had to read very far into SA's book (page 4) as the hat is mentioned in great detail, very early on. I love that Simon says his wife looks good in a hat, and his daughter would look good even under a plant pot or lamp shade :)

Unfortunately when I tried to book I got this message:

Sorry, this event is fully booked.

I don’t think she reads much either, but I suppose it’s possible that, once she’d decided she needed to set the essentially fictional walk in 2013 to fit the house repossession, she may have done a bit of googling to see if there were any events on the SWCP that year that she needed to be aware of, like what was playing at the Minack, and, in doing so, become aware of SA’s book and the timing of his walk, and thought it was a useful ‘alibi’ for locating them on the SWCP.

The same coloured hat thing is particularly nonsensical if she had read Walking Away, as SA goes to considerable lengths to make it clear that his hat is a ridiculously expensive impulse purchase which comes with an instruction manual, a lifetime guarantee, and pre-printed slips to hand out to strangers who admire it and want one of their own — hardly the vibe that penniless ‘tramp’ TW was apparently giving off. (And acc TSP, TW’s hat is a green canvas affair that ‘sat on top of his head like a cake tin’.😀)

I had only just booked when I sent that message, so that's strange. As I say I am currently subscribed but it didn't mention that. I don't trust their system though because last time some of us were unable to book and had to be sent the link by another poster. Someone else will have to try for us to know, for definite.

I increasingly think that she went through Our Simon's book in forensic detail while compiling TSP. Agree too @ThompsonTwin how would people 'mistaking him for SA' have known what sort of hat he was wearing in advance? The busker is a Frank Sinatra tribute he was taken with, he's thanked in the long list at the end.

I'd be so peed off if I were him, I really would.

ETA agree with all comments I crossed with re The Hat. He gets sunburned at one point and Sue (who I really like the sound of) makes a snarky comment about possibly wearing the expensive hat in future to prevent such.

It's so entangling the way that Salray has taken real events to link them to the SWCP in 2013. Then making themselves ahead of SA, and Tim mistaken for him, to give themselves credibility. The level of deception involved in all of this, is it intelligence or cunning? I'm not surprised that SA didn't want to talk to Chloe, he must be peed off as you say @Uricon2 , he probably just wants to forget TSP, it's a shame because it will probably have had a negatively impact, of how he views his own journey and book.

I think that walk was rather trying for SA at times (his back, the terrain, boots packing up, Seamus Heaney dying) and yet he managed it and to write an enjoyable, funny book without the truly (untrue) Gothic overlay of the Great Raymoth Romance and Sundry Cruel Injustices.

You're right @Freshsocks he was used to give them credibility in their schtick, like so many others. Salray must have thought all her Christmases had arrived simultaneously when he was made PL.

I’ve just managed to book it.
i’ll send you the link.

With massive apologies to Emily Bronte and most especially the wonderful Kate Bush. I blame the coverage of that new film (which sounds dreadful, IMO)

" Out on the wily windy cliffs,
We'd stride and eat noodles
Only we didn't, I made that up
Cos I need to sell this book

How could you leave me to get Beowulf
When I needed to possess you?
I hated you, I loved you, too

Oh TiMoth, it's me, I'm Sal-eee
I've come home now
Because you are my home now
Until we can afford a large farmhouse oo oo"

The new film has significant inverted commas, it is called "Wuthering Heights" to show that it is a cross between Mills & Boon and Carry On Up Top Withens, I mean to show that it is an interpretation. Look out for "On Winter Hill" - the inverted commas may be significant ...

Absolutely. I was given Wuthering Heights as a school prize sometime in the 70s and had to put it aside and pick up our O level books (Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, Julius Caesar, St Joan) as light relief.

It truly scared me a bit. I'm not sure it is filmable really, and it needs the touch of Hareton/Cathy2 hope at the end IMO.

I couldn’t agree more with everything you’ve said here and your above posts about Sal doing her research when she was cobbling together a feasible account of their walk in a certain year. I love your song and I agree with your thoughts about the new film! {{shudder}}

I think Simon’s hat more than paid for itself on that walk because he was such a success! I can vouch that everything he says about it is true. I have one and it stays on my head and keeps me dry in the worst of weathers. I’ve had cheaper hats in the past which have been rubbish, so to have one for a lifetime is well worth it.
The link to his slideshow of photos took me to another link where he’s written a new poem for Pink Floyd to commemorate Wish you were Here’s 50th anniversary. I’m such a fan of the early Floyd, so that was a lovely surprise.

I agree it's not filmable, and this take on it looks spectacularly terrible from the trailer. Which surprises me, as Emerald Fennell is not a fool, and whether or not you liked Saltburn, it wasn't a stupid film. Whereas this WH looks like a cross between a particularly lurid Meatloaf video, Gone With the Wind, and a satire on wet-shirted bodice-rippers. Are either C or H entirely dry, ever, in the entire trailer?

I honestly don’t know how on earth she has the brazen balls to talk with any authority or credibility about being homeless. Technically they lost their home but all the stupid things they did which resulted in that loss are not the sort of things that many homeless people can identify with. It’s a bourgeois sort of homelessness and the way she turned it into something else by completely eliminating the criminal activity which she engineered, in order to sell themselves as victims is beyond belief. She sits there chatting away, completely unaffected by all the lies she’s told. I’m crap on camera or any kind of recording at all and I have nothing to hide and yet she is a natural! Not a single giveaway in her demeanour that she’s lying her socks off. How do you do it? Years of practice? I suppose it is her forte.

The trailer I saw makes the famous Mr Darcy 1990s wet shirt look like a suit of armour, this one is so diaphonous.

ETA and we know it rains in Yorkshire, but there are few dry days.