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

Is this really their first meeting or were they just shoe horned in at this point?
I agree, that conversation is ridiculous.

That conversation is like all SW's dialogue. Whatever the conversation, it all has the same weird, stilted quality. Completely unrealistic and unbelievable.

Almost as though it’s been scripted…

Apparently 8.6mn people walk bits of the SWCP each year and, according to the FB SWCP discussion board, most of those walkers carry backpacks (either day packs or larger ruck sacks!)

Well, yes — especially as there’s nothing in particular to distinguish the Walkers as any kind of hardcore backpackers at this point. They’ve only just got back on the path after months (if not years) of living under a roof. They can’t be particularly tanned, or weatherbeaten, or unwashed-looking, and Big Dave immediately launches into a monologue about having seen two backpackers before but didn’t believe the’d come far because they looked ‘too clean’ and another two who didn’t count because they were ‘only out for the weekend’. The Walkers have only walked one day and camped one night, so there seems no reason why Dave and Julie should be so struck by them.

I wonder how they know that, or even estimate. The only place where I know that they count you is the Stairway to Devon - one of the bits the Walkers missed out 😆

Of course, we know that the readers and publishers were very generous and forgiving because the story trumped everything else and they were there, live and in the flesh, this long suffering miracle couple of saints in hair shirts. In TSP, Moth pretends to be Simon Armitage and reads from Beowulf and people put money into his hat. She boasts about Moth’s stories and how he enthrals people. She took their begging bowl of pity guilt trips into Penguin and they bought it. She must have been jubilant and not because little ol’ her had never written a book in her life.

Edit: the poor dialogue is forgiven because ⬆️

Armitage alert: Our Simon will be talking about clouds next Tuesday. Bring your fudge & cider!

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002sn4j

Also noticable that SalTim have had miraculous personality transplants by this point. Rather than identifying as "homeless" and "different" to all the other path walkers in leg one, here they see themselves as kindred backpackers. One may argue it is character development, but if that were so she should have written how her outlook had changed. But the way it is just seems odd, as with the whole 2nd leg section.

In so far as Tim and Sal are her friends rather than her patients, I'd really like to ask Julie the following simple questions:

• can you tell me when and how you first met Raynor and Moth?

• have you read The Salt Path? Are the incidents where you and your husband are portrayed, accurate?

• when you first met Raynor and Moth were you aware that they had lost their home and that Moth was suffering from CBD?

• over the years have you seen any change in Moth's physical condition?

• did you ever have any inkling that many of the incidents described in TSP were fabricated?

• many readers of Raynor Winn's books have been left disappointed and angry at the Observer revelations. How do you feel?

Indeed. Photos of them on day 1 of the walk from South Haven Point.

I think they 'guesstimate' from numbers taken from various points - pubs and cafes along the way, public toilet useage, campsite bookings, car parks etc. It won't be precise but they can tell whether the numbers are going up or down and a very rough guideline of numbers using sections of the path, from which computers will work out a ballpark figure.

My understanding is it wasn't a day.

According to what she told the Big Issue editor:

Raynor also told me that she’d put her plans to self-publish on hold. “I had given up hope of getting an agent or publisher but randomly approached an agent 10 days ago, mentioning the Big Issue article (thought I’d give it one last go) and she came back to me within the day. Just completing the proposal to be sent out to publishers, so fingers crossed. Don’t think she’d have considered it if it hadn’t been for your article, so thanks again.”

So the agent got back to her after a day (ie 9 days ago), and by day 10 a proposal for sending to publishers was being drafted.

Is this more credible and realisitic?

Tbh i don't believe any of the claimed publishing timeline and think it is as made up as TSP. Compare "randomly approached an agent" to what RW has previously stated about researching agents, specifically targeting those who are middle aged women and most likely to "get" her story. That isn't random, it's thorough and calculated.

It still sounds unreasonably fast. She'd have to have signed and returned the contract without even reading it, and the agent would already have had to have had interest from the publishers before she signed the contract. And there's usually some back and forth between agent and author to make sure that you are a good fit for each other before the contract is even sent out. You can be the best author in the world but some agents still won't get on with you and might not represent you, so they like to check that you're a functional human being first.

It's just a theory but it's possible that Tim and Sal did walk the stretch of the SWCP between South Haven Point and West Bay in late July 2014 as claimed in TSP and for that reason, D&J may have believed that the walk which featured them in TSP was fairly accurate!

Why do I say that? In a word - the weather

The weather in the Poole area from 21-29 July 2014 when I think they walked from South Haven Point to West Bay stretch of the SWCP perfectly matches the description of each day's weather in TSP. Basically hot and sunny. In contrast the weather during the same period in 2015 and 2016 was overcast with a fair amount of rain! Food for thought!

It's true that there aren't any photos of D&J on that stretch of the SWCP, but there is a shadow to the left of the tent on Chesil beech, which strongly suggests the proximity of another tent (D&J's) as described in TSP when Tim and Sal's tent poles frayed and Dave conveniently fixed them with some gaffer tape and pliers which he happened to be carrying in his rucksack!

The podcast makers obviously didn't read the brief - the tent was green and they never used walking poles! Tbh I'm not sure how much new is going to be revealed by 'Secrets of the Salt Path'.

I think I raised the walking pole question somewhere - when I queried how someone who was as 'obviously ill' as Tim could walk without any walking aids and someone posted a picture of him with a pole...

Of course, that might not have been the Cornish Walk and might have been elsewhere, but I'm still surprised that, given his alleged limited mobility, they weren't loaded up with various walking aids. My mum became a bit infirm later in life and always went about with a shooting stick. She could use it as something to lean on when walking and then something to sit on when she stopped. Tim seems, miraculously, to never have needed any such thing, even at the beginnings of walks when he was limping, dragging his leg, falling, etc.

Yes, the very steep parts would have been impossible on the descent for a man with a weak, wobbly, dragging leg and no walking aid/pole. He’d have ended up splatting onto the rocks below.

Sally wrote Dave and Julie’s dialogue as being very worried about Tim in the subsequent books.

My friend managed to fall and break her arm whilst walking on reasonably level ground with a walking pole - and she doesn't have limited mobility! (Her pole bent as she tripped and deposited her on the ground). So I would have thought in Tim's case - what with all his walking problems (yeah, right), he might have gone for two poles to help himself balance.

Yet in the photos - no poles!

Which is interesting in itself, especially if we run with the theory (for a minute anyway) that in fact, for once, their first encounters with Dave and Julie might actually be roughly as written in TSP — they liked them and clearly planned to stay in touch, therefore SW had to rein in her fiction-spinning for that part, because she would have to account for licence taken later?

Here were two people who, unlike ‘Polly’ and other family members, knew nothing at all about their real past and weren’t expecting them to help out on a farm or get jobs or declare bankruptcy and restart their lives, and at least one of them worked with ex-offenders and may have been sympathetic to some version of ‘did bad things, lost our home’, eventually, if not when actually on the path, so might it be the case that SW’s odd absence of glumwashing and uncritically positive depiction of D and J was that here was a potentially ongoing relationship that (a) she couldn’t twist for fictional purposes and/or (b) that she didn’t really need to twist for fictional purposes?

Because, for once, this bit of the walk happened roughly as she says, if we overlook stuff like ‘Polly’ not being a slave driver who threw them out on the street, and the fact that they’ve just been living comfortably under two different family members’ roofs (rooves?) for 18 months. They’re not cosplaying homelessness because they’ve only just set out again, they have enough money to buy nights in BnBs, ice lollies, breakfasts in cafes etc, and have to admit this in TSP, because D and J see them do it, and it’s strongly implied in the ridiculous scene where the female diver strips to her bikini and where Dave monologues about not wanting to get old and have angina, arthritis, diabetes etc, and how he’s ’just going to keep walking, then we’ll be all right’ and TW gives SW a look that says ‘Don’t say it’ that they haven’t told D and J about him being terminally ill.

(Though, equally clearly, blunt, outspoken Dave, who doesn’t have a filter, and presumably would have said ‘You look sick’ to TW if he thought it, hasn’t noticed TW looking or moving like a seriously ill man, even though supposedly TW is in a bad way again after the winter at Polly’s?)

Also, can’t help but notice that the second they wave Dave and Julie off at Weymouth, we’re out of ‘fellowship of backpackers mode’ and hitting the ‘homeless mode’ again. ‘John’, the homeless labourer who lives in the woodland community apparently recognises them as fellow-homeless because of the ‘homeless’ way SW keeps her arms through her backpack when resting, and SW notes that he’s ’as dirty as us’.

But the Walkers have no reason at all to be remotely dirty. They’ve just spent the last two nights staying in a Weymouth hotel with an en-suite! And they’ve only been wild-camping again for a couple of nights before that. Nothing at all to mark them out as ‘homeless’. I assume that entire encounter with the woodland homeless is pure fantasy, before they re-encounter Dave and Julie at Moonfleet Manor and everything is suddenly more luxurious again — nice hotel gardens, using the loo, putting luxurious handcream on.

All good points. The Pavement article suggests that the encounter with the homeless community didn't take place in Dorset (if it took place at all) so the episode was airdropped into the narrative to get it back onto message before they bumped into D&J once again in the loos at Moonfleet Manor.

That seems entirely likely — because otherwise this bit of the walk is pure ‘middle-aged couple having a pleasant time backpacking in nice weather in tourist hotspots, with another not dissimilar pair of middle-aged backpackers for company’. And even though just after they finally part from Dave and Julie is the Magical Moment when TW planks on the trig point at Golden Cap, and says he feels great, after only two weeks back on the path (though it’s clear SW has skipped over many of these days, as I can only count nine ‘nights’ out from the start of the path), Ch 20 starts all gloomy, with ‘Living with a death sentence’, and Moth saying he wants to be cremated, his ashes kept till SW dies and both sets scattered together on the coast so they can ‘find the horizon together’. In case we’d forgotten they’re not just two people between jobs who are off on a jolly.

The ashes being scattered bit features in her appearance in Britain by the Book with Mel Giedroyc and Martin Clunes on the Dorset coast when she has the nerve to say that if hadn't been for the walk on the SWCP that featured in TSP, Moth would undoubtedly be dead!

May have moved a couple of copies of TSP to the fantasy section in my local bookstore. It's the small things.