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

Really sorry for your loss, Tonstant Weader. May the other side of his rainbow bridge be all rabbit-filled meadows, and no vets, or baths.

Seems like the BBC Wales Secrets of the Salt Path podcast is out shortly

Secrets of the Salt Path - BBC Radio Wales Podcasts

At last - thanks for waking me up ... I was in a reverie about the Salt Path, and the things I still wasn't sure about. I think they are basically things we wouldn't be able to find out. It seemed to me to be likely that Sal would have been trying to get published for a while and that the reason she was accepted was that she was remarkably willing to be pliable, for a memoirist.

Well, this is strange. I have now listened to the 3 min preview of :
Secrets of the Salt Path - BBC Radio Wales Podcasts

And the recording picked up twice on this quote that I have always found very knowing, a bit sinister in light of what is to come really:

I thought about Grant’s tale and why he felt driven to tell it. When you tell a story, the first person you must convince is yourself; if you can make yourself believe it’s true, then everyone else will follow.

I have quoted this myself, a couple of times, on these threads as it does prove she knew exactly what she was doing.

Another example, from one of our posters right back near the beginning:

WynkenDeWorde · 06/07/2025 19:13

A very interesting biography of the mysterious 'Izzy Wyn-Thomas' on the 'about' page of that Gangani publishing website linked upthread.

Izzy Wyn-Thomas is an exciting new voice and author of our first release; How not to Dal dy Dir. An irreverent look at rural Wales and City finance, her book has been described both as 'an offbeat view of minority culture' and 'a beginners guide to asset-stripping'. Izzy, who has spent much of her life in North-West Wales, says her book grew from the idea that nothing is as it seems, and every story changes in the light of the readers viewpoint.

(my bold, above) To me, this shows the whole conception of Lightly Salted Blackberries and the eventual publication of TSP 22 Mar. 2018 is a very planned and knowingly executed project from the beginning:

How Not to Dal Dy Dir
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gangani Publishing Ltd
Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 May 2012

Thank you @ThompsonTwin and @BrandyAndLovage, I just had a listen to the preview, it is interesting that Salray talks about deception, how to sway others and make them believe something is true. Salray used every trick in the book to deceive and emotionally manipulate her readers, in a way that seems knowing and deliberate. I was pleased to hear Ruth Saberton is contributing, she has such a good perspective on Raymoth.

Thank you for waking up the thread again @ThompsonTwin ! I was only thinking today, I wonder if there’s any news… I’ll google… and then forgot. I was also thinking that Moth hasn’t been on a LDW for a long time and you can’t count just ambling round a large estate, apparently.

To continue what I was mulling over, above. It was really to look at what we have, not in the book but from evidence, between the summer of 2013:

The Walkers' house is repossessed
Moth surfs with their son in Newquay
Gangani Publishing - Dissolved on 30 July 2013
The Walkers walk some of the north coast of the SWCP
Their son drives them to Bristol

and the publication of TSP 22 Mar. 2018, with a view to establishing how much of a moveable feast it has been.

At our AMA with OC this was asked, as part of a two-part question:

ipathi · 28/01/2026 18:46

do you think there is any weight or meaning to her IG handle being her pen name from the start (2016) and in the content / sign off from the big issue letter (2017) & did her publisher or agent know her real name?

OC only gets to the latter part: Publishers and agent would have know legal names because all bank and legal documents would have been in their real names.

However, it is interesting that she is already Raynor Winn and promoting her story.

I found an article that I had not read before which was for homeless people, but not The Big Issue. Strangely, it was published 2 days after Raynor's TBI article on 12 July 2017 but it is not the same. I was interested to see that the story about the homeless community in the forest was different and not particularly set in Dorset. In TSP John takes them by van after coming across them?

the Pavement magazine - The hidden homeless

Ugh. The way she tells her “story” is so sickening. Moth “wasn’t sick enough” for them to get a council house. Damn right he wasn’t and how awful would that have been if they’d managed to fool that lady into thinking he was and thus forcing somebody or a family who was eligible back down the queue. I picked Landlines up off the floor again the other day, opened it at random and it chanced upon some guff about their children, how they’d lost the family home too yada yada … because of this nasty person Cooper… it went on and on, really twisting the reader’s heartstrings. They weren’t made homeless by any of that! She made them all homeless. Mother and father made the children homeless and it was nobody else’s fault.

She knew she needed to publish under a psuedonym to hide from the people she has ripped off. And it worked for years.

Absolutely @AlwaysRightISwear to hide.
She gave birth to Raynor Winn and set her off on that course. Writing the articles for the homeless magazines as Raynor Winn was very well planned indeed and a fantastic springboard. What kind of person is so low that they exploit the most vulnerable people in our society? All she could think was, what an excellent way to give my new persona some exposure.

Great find. The homeless community 30 mins from Weymouth always seemed to me fabricated. It didn't fit into the chronology and it seemed unlikely that they would have met the Walkers on the beach at Weymouth after going shopping for food after a day at work, putting the food in a rucksack and then driving by van to the forest community!

The photo in the article is Cudden Point near Stackhouse Cove in Cornwall which is mentioned in TSP

Another article by Raynor Winn in Pavement magazine in Sept 2017

the Pavement magazine - Alternative highs

Thanks - that's a bit different, which made me wonder if Julie was anything to do with Caritas Care, it is based in their county.

A familiar theme was "Chemicals emitted by plants" but we're only 6 months away from TSP published when this went out. I wish I had thought to ask Chloe when LSB was sent to her contact - this person had not said they wished to remain anonymous, she did not tell us because she had not asked permission.

Yes, it always seemed deeply unlikely. Presumably the whole ‘community in the wood’ was a fiction, possibly inspired by encountering other, actually homeless people (whom I bet they never approached, far less befriended and by whom they almost certainly weren’t identified as fellow-homeless because SW kept her arms through her rucksack when resting).

That entire Pavement article is spectacularly irritating and misleading. By referring to ‘the next two summers’ she gives the impression they were living in a tent continuously for more than a year, probably longer, and all that nonsense about second homes and tourist lets meaning you wouldn’t sleep on the streets there ‘because of the prejudice’ suggests she really hasn’t a clue.

Homeless people who sleep rough in urban areas generally choose visible places in doorways etc for safety reasons, so they’re not attacked out of sight, either by other homeless or passing yobs — it’s a toss up between whether they’re safer out of sight or in sight. The stakes are different when there are large amounts of accessible countryside around, and few other homeless. They’re not not rough sleeping in the tourist towns of Cornwall and Devon because they are afraid they will be set upon by expensively jacketed yachty types shouting ‘Down with tramps!’

Yes, that sounds perfectly possible. It would fit with her depiction of ‘Julie’.

Also amused at how ‘Moth’ has been completely deleted from this version of ‘Raynor Winn’s homeless walk.

“I was at the lowest point, homeless, with no hope for the future when I decided to go for a walk. By the time I stopped 600 miles later, it had literally changed my life. Not only had it given me the space and time to come to terms with the life-changing events I had gone through, it had also given me a sense of inner strength that would help me rebuild my life. Walking such a long distance, with a rucksack on my back that contained everything I needed to survive, empowered me in a way that nothing else has.”
All about her and crowbarring in at every opportunity her “story” minus all the criminal activity, for which there is no remorse. She’s shaken that off like a snake shedding its skin. The irony of talking with and meeting the project manager of a charity which is set up to help men who’ve been in prison and nodding along to her every word without once thinking that she would have gone to prison if a rich relative hadn’t been able to bail her out.

Agreed. Since Moth willingly became saddled with a terminal disease, it gave him a pass to remain placidly in the background while “Ray” did all the talking, presumably because he was not fit to make decisions or to be able to talk coherently. As time went on and the adulation began, he couldn’t resist breaking back out a bit.

This group never ceases to amaze.

So RW published an article a year before TSP, saying that her lowest point in life was losing her home and that walking (supposedly 600 miles) helped because it gave her space to think and "inner strength". Not a mention of terminal diagnoses or miracle cures for CBD?

And no mention in the September 2017 article of a beloved husband trudging faithfully by her side, either perfectly healthy or dragging one foot bravely because he has a death sentence!

’Raynor’ is striding out solo in this version of events and the ‘life-changing events’ have seemingly been undergone by her alone.

Despite the fact that less than two months earlier, she’d published an article in the same publication where she’s accompanied on what is obviously the same walk by her husband.

This is all happening at the same time as her Big Issue article and (apparently) her querying agents with Lightly Salted Blackberries and being signed.

Is she still experimenting with different angles, like is it more appealing to readers to be a woman walking alone, or a woman with a dying husband at her side? Or just trying to build up her homeless credibility by publishing two different articles in The Pavement as well as the Big Issue by essentially trying to spin two different fictions?

God knows we’ve seen enough evidence that she’s gifted at spinning the slightest RL experience, like a walking holiday while living rent-free and lying low from creditors and debt collectors on your niece’s farm, into a grand narrative involving longterm rough sleeping, betrayal by friends and imminent death.

Amazing insights from everyone above. I had not seen what has been posted like all of you have - incredibly perceptive.

I was really reaching for the idea that Izzy had finally expired with the closing down of Gangani in July 2013 (presumably taking with her 'Three Ceilidhs and a Mountain?) and then 'Becoming Raynor Winn'.

Coupled with how much was this story "all things to all people" and prepared to totally continue to adapt and create new connections (rather like Sal's references to neuroplasticity).

Oh, SW’s stories are high on the plasticity quotient all right!😀

But she’s always a ‘pure soul’. In her own head, anyway…

Agreeing with everybody here. I think it is very telling that even after the 2015 doctors letters, “Raynor” is not presenting Moth at all in these articles, let alone the fictional version from TSP. I’m sorry, this part completely passed me by! So yes, she was still experimenting with her persona and her hooks for the future bestseller.

@BrandyAndLovage : Thank you for the reminder of Gangani's webssite. Interesting to read it again.

"Izzy Wyn-Thomas is an exciting new voice and author of our first release; How not to Dal dy Dir. An irreverent look at rural Wales and City finance, her book has been described both as 'an offbeat view of minority culture' and 'a beginners guide to asset-stripping'."

I’m just about catching up. Reading the observations above about Julie/Caritas, I googled Caritas and found a photo in which a woman looked like the Julie in Sal’s photos. What do you think?
Caritas ACE project