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

Jumping aboard again!

So they may be holed up in their Cornish mansion shopping online and getting all their fudge and cider groceries delivered. But what about doctor's, dentist's or optician's appointments? Yes, they have the means to pay for private home visits but scans and x-rays require a visit to a hospital or facility with specialist equipment.

Mammograms? Eye checks?

They can't stay inside forever.

And Moth must be back on the brink of death without a long walk after all this time. So surely they'd be back and forth to his specialist for scans. Wouldn't they?

When Moth/If Moth has to travel to see his doctors and consultants hundreds of miles away, I imagine the Walkers will make a huge fanfare about it or somehow leak it to the press.

Do we know why Tim left his job as a gardener at Plas-yn-Rhiw?

I know HNTDDD is fiction - but it seems closer to reality than a lot of the content of the other books - and that also just refers to his mental state as a justification for her actions. What we know, so far anyway, from Chloe:

the thing that drives her, is making things right for her husband, Baxter, who is essentially falling apart, because he can't cope with the mess they've made of their finances.

Publication date ‏ : ‎ 1 May 2012

As the charabanc Writing Correspondent, I can confirm that Sal will have made a fraction of that amount, Her agent will have taken at least 20% of the earnings, the publishers make their proportion (sorry not to be more exact but it will depend on the deal she signed, but publishers take a fair whack to offset what is, after all, their risk), the taxman will also have taken his share (assuming they haven't gone offshore or found other ways around paying the high level of tax that will be due on this). She might have made 25% of the quoted amount - still not an inconsiderable sum and one most of us can only dream of, but nowhere near the amount that is always quoted that the books have earned.

Yes, I think there is a strong parallel between confession letter and what we know about. HNTDDD. It is quite revealing that both the confession letter (written after 2008) and HNTDDD (written at some point between 2009 and 2012) make no mention of neurodegenerative disease or physical condition and instead focus on Tim's mental state.

Chloe said it was labelled as “crime fiction”, I think. The similarities to the real life events are closer than the Salt Path’s. It does seem like a very odd thing to do, to write a book solely for the purpose of trying to raise the money to pay your debtors. The content is a confession to everything she’s done and the thoughts she had at the time.
The idea might have been pulled as soon as Tim or the children pointed this out. Why would Sally be so brazen with this? Was she starting to get a bit delirious under pressure, thinking to hell with it or just some ideas about her ability as a writer and an assumption that people would enjoy it and “write what you know”? Whatever the reason, it’s clear that TSP was not the quaint notes of a hesitant first book debut author, tied up with string for Moth’s birthday with the added sentiment that he was losing his memory. Everyone got the violins out and started throwing money at them.

Yes, I wonder why Sal didn't lean into mental health rather than CBD? It would have been more believable for Tim to make a recovery from depression through walking in nature; any relapses would be understandable (not quite so much once they'd made a fortune, but money doesn't buy good mental health after all) and they could have raised money for mental health charities with all their walks and appearances.

Also more explicable to have a hale and hearty Tim on the red carpet or on TV and then have him go downhill straight afterwards, depression being the unpredictable thing that it is.

Could it be because mental illness isn't quite the very rare, inevitably terminal thing that would tug heartstrings?

The Haye Farm IG feed is well worth following as it features a lot of photos of the farm and orchard while Sal and Tim were living there including Tim's famous ecological piles of twigs (brash?) which had environmental scientists in raptures (apparently) and an aerial shot of the orchards

Instagram

I think a lot of it is that she doesn't have much imagination. So she wrote a book about the only thing that she could think of - 'My Life, So Far'. It's how a lot of writers start out, only they usually do this bit when they're about seven, writing about their life and then giving it a nice resolution.

Then she switched to non-fiction (probably having realised her limitations and how tough fiction is) and just wrote the same story again.

Environmental scientists in raptures? They should have a wander through the woods here - every third tree has a pile of collected brash leaning against it! Was Salray trying to portray this as innovative? Because I'm no environmental scientist but I suspect she wasn't the first person to think of this!

Also, I apologise for the next question, but having fallen off the charabanc after a particularly tight corner taken rather too fast on a bumpy road, I have forgotten some early findings. What is the significance of the husband in HNTDTD being called Baxter? The protaganist is Elias or something similar, which is almost Sally backwards (phonetically at least!) - is Baxter something to do with Tim's family?

(even squashed fudge is good. Mmm. Especially when you've been sitting on a forgotten (wrapped!) piece in your back packet and it's warm!)

I think she rather liked the more melodramatic option. TSP really only draws on their experiences of walking and camping sporadically. Everything else that is supposed to be significant, has been made up or grossly exaggerated for effect. Why she even had the idea to write about it in the first place, I don’t know, except all her other sources of income (fraudulent or legitimate) had dried up. Perhaps when they were out cosplaying homelessness, one or two people they engaged with expressed surprise at their predicament and suggested they write about their story. At that point, she probably wouldn’t be saying that Moth had an incurable illness, just that they’d lost their home. What made them decide that Moth had CBD? When she eventually sat down and started to write TSP, what was the lightbulb moment that made her write about him having had a CBD diagnosis? It must be that she always deliberately set out to deceive, in order to garner attention and reap the most sympathy. She does love a good battle with emotions and personifies and anthropomorphises them as much as possible in her writing. She projects her angry feelings onto others and they are then described subjectively which the reader has to sympathise with because it shows us that the poor dear is having a breakdown, understandably. So, at some point she probably thought, how can I make this more exciting? How can I make Raynor into a proper heroine?

I remember the controversy over TSP being covered by these presenters - but I don't think this recap has been shared. There isn't anything we haven't covered and it is really them incorporating what it learnt from the Sky doc. It may be good for anyone wanting to catch up and interesting that they think the scandal was "very well proven by The Observer".

Some of the comments are worth a look (although this video includes other topics). It is from 1.44 to 17.56m about our topic.

kevinwhelan
I'm wondering if it was first written as a novel and subsequently rejected- it would explain a lot the fictional elements. Then one of them had the lightbulb moment of presenting it as a memoir. Ka-ching! As more than one literary agent will tell you, memoirs are the new novels, and the reading public can never get enough of an "against all odds" story

I don’t think there was any particular significance to Baxter, unless I’ve forgotten some key discovery? I think people were just amused at SW’s evident taste for surnames as first names — Baxter, Cooper, Raynor etc. I am personally also unreasonably amused by her preference for somewhat exotic, surname-y, androgynous names for their alter egos in both HNTDDD and TSP (Raynor, Moth, Ellias and Baxter) when their actual names are the galumphingly unexotic Sally Ann and Tim.

One of the bits of her first statement that I actually believe (maybe the only one?) is that she dislikes her own name, that Sally Ann made her ‘think of ringlets and gingham dresses’.

What is clearly nonsense (as testified by numerous people telling CH they’d never heard them address one another as anything other than Sally and Tim, even when they’d introduced themselves as Raynor and Moth, and the plaster inscription at Pen y Maes) is that she’d told TW this early in their relationship, and he’d called her Ray ever since, after the ‘family name’ of Raynor she wished she’d been given.

Do we know what she means by ‘family name’ incidentally? Raynor or Rayner is a reasonably common surname. Does she mean it’s a surname that exists somewhere in her family tree? It would have been a pretty unusual decision to give a girl born in 1962 a surname that’s only rarely used as a male first name, especially for parents who’d named their elder child Sue/Susan.

Personally Raynor/Rayner just makes me think of Rayners Lane tube station, which is presumably not what SW was going for…

Do we know what she means by ‘family name’ incidentally? Raynor or Rayner is a reasonably common surname. Does she mean it’s a surname that exists somewhere in her family tree?

Yes, her mother's maiden name was Raynor.

Thanks — I think you’d said this before! Mind you, it’s a pretty big leap to being wistful that your mother ‘s birth surname hadn’t been given to you as a first name at a time when that would have been an unheard-of decision. Her parents weren’t swinging sixties types!

I might be confusing the timelines here, but didn't Sally claim in her alleged confession letter to her sister that Moth was very ill? I think she said something about how the bills were the only burden she had the power to ease, so in desperation she stole to pay them. I wonder if she and Moth eventually told their respective families that he was dying in the hope that it would dissuade them from going to the police ("Please don't send me to prison, we don't even know how long we have left on this earth together!").

Then, of course, they would have had to explain why the fuck he was still alive all these years later, so why not claim fresh air and exercise cured him? Kill two birds with one stone: Moth can explain his miraculous recovery, and Sally now has a USP for her book.

I think she gives the impression he’s seriously, even dangerously depressed and mired in self-loathing for having invested unwisely in the friend’s company, and, implicitly, that only she, and her light-fingered management of household money, is keeping him from total nervous collapse or even suicide.

Then there’s some reference at the end to ‘Of course, Tim being told he might have Parkinson’s doesn’t help’, or something like that.

Bit it seems to be primarily MH concerns SW is spinning at this point to try to persuade her sister not to call the police.

In the "I've take it all" article in The Observer, it says that family members did not believe Moth's health claims "We never worried ..". However, Tim's parents believed he was dying, and his niece believes that they thought that prosecuting them would not have been in his best interests.

Yes, she does add near the end that Tim has now heard he might have Parkinson's but that is the only detail. It is possibly the first reference to any neuro disease from Sal. The letter also says the house is on the market suggesting the letter was probably written between 2010-2011.

Another intriguing part of the house being on the market is that Sal says: We need to release the funds to pay our debts, but also we need a fresh start.

I repeat "WE NEED A FRESH START." That is not someone writing in desperation on the brink of homelessness.

AI takes TSP to new levels of absurdity!

Wow, if he was supposed to be pruning those apple trees he's done an awful job. There's a saying that you should be able to throw a bowler hat through an apple tree after it's pruned.

As a newbie can I ask where Tim was trained to be a gardener as he I think was employed as one on quite a big house?

Perhaps at this very moment SW is using AI to create a new identity for the two of them, or simply endeavouring to re-write OWH in the style of whoever?
Not that I understand how AI works (not yet, anyway) . Years ago a friend asserted that AI was only as good as the info already available "on line". (I imagine by now the sheer quantity of which is mind boggling.) So I tentatively asked the chatbot to design a picture representing "On Winter Hill" and to my amazement it duly obliged. Four pictures in total of snow-covered hills, any of which would make great Christmas cards!

Elias is a not uncommon surname in the Pwllheli area. A few threads ago I was entertaining myself rearranging 'Elias' to produce 'i.e.Sal'.

Today I realised that a rearrangement of 'Baxter' produces 'T: Exbar'. (Those old enough to remember Blake's 7 will recall that the planet Exbar was a penal colony). Chortle.

Welcome @NotAnotherScarf The earliest available info on Tim and gardening is this archived article from the BBC, unusually he isn't wearing a scarf in any form:

BBC - North West Wales Outdoors - Plas yn Rhiw