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

So if I were D&J I'd know the Walkers said nothing about CBD the first time I met them in 2014. First 'diagnosis' was 2015. But at some point I'd realise the terminal diagnosis was backdated in the books to just before the first walk.

Would I question this, at least privately? A non-judgemental attitude is probably top of the list of essential job requirements for working with ex- offenders. And SW the arch manipulator may have played on this with Julie by indicating a slightly shady past, unspecified things she regretted doing, in order to illicit sympathy and head off awkward questions about exactly what happened and when. She, just like the people Julie supported, was turning her life around.

D&J clearly didn't have any doubts about the veracity of the diagnosis because they joined in the fundraising PSPA walks. And they didn't enquire too closely because 'good' things were happening. Money was being raised for a good cause, Moth was still alive, SW had turned their trials into a literary and financial success, readers were inspired by the book.

If the Walkers had met a couple of retired detectives or fraud investigators on their walk in 2014 I think things would have been different.

I was meaning more generally for writing the book, not what they did or did not say to D&J. TSP claims Moth had CBD in 2013 so why did they not lean into that when writing about talking to strangers. I'm talking about the writing not the reality here.

Yes you are probably right. Dave isn't portrayed as the brightest spark in the universe.

I guess it's quite possible that D&J think its all a witch hunt and that the good work that Sal has done raising the profile of PSPA and the homeless more than offsets any peripheral damage to genuine CBD sufferers and readers who are cheesed off that they have been sold a pup.

Sorry about my misuse of 'illicit' instead of 'elicit'. 😳Mistakes were made. Can't think why a word describing illegality should come to mind...

I’ve always assumed her editor had her take out her mother’s death primarily on structural grounds. It took the focus off the walk, and the two of them ‘alone against the world on a salty headland’ guff.

Plus it would have raised all kinds of implicit questions for a reader — if SW had a living mother, why weren’t they in touch with her, and wouldn’t she have helped when they were made homeless? If she were elderly and in poor health, shouldn’t SW have been at her side or at least in regular touch, rather than uncontactable on the SWVP with a phone that was apparently seldom charged or functional? If they were estranged, why? Etc etc.

As CH uncovered, the real situation with both SW and TW’s families is both incredibly dark, revealing the depths of their criminal graspingness to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds, but also, conversely, one of generosity, which shows the Walkers were never homeless, but were housed by a number of different family members covering the entire period of their purported homelessness…

I wish that I could link to the article that i saw in the Telegraph (behind paywall).
It was about the author Amy Griffin and her book 'The Tell' being called the America's Salt Path scandal.
Guess the publisher.... Penguin Random House!
I would say that I know nothing about this drug therapy or any of the background to this story.
I am, however, happy to see that the Salt Path scandal still lives on.

I still find it mind boggling that nearly 8 months after the Observer story broke and the mountains of evidence that emerged to suggest that much of TSP was based on a pack of lies, there hasn't been a shred of admission of guilt or contrition from Sal.

To everyone who has read and loved my books, thank you. Nothing has changed. The Salt Path remains my honest recollection of the time when we lost our house and found hope on the Coast Path. Except in limited cases, where names of people or details of places and events were changed to protect privacy, as explained at the front of every copy.

Why would she admit to anything, though? If we leave out an unsigned piece of paper with typing on it that she says she didn’t write (and, somewhat more mysteriously, the handwritten letters to her mother which CH says were determined by a handwriting expert to be ‘very likely’ to be by SW, but from which CH doesn’t, to my memory, quote?), not confessing has served her well. OK, she’s lost her teaching/wellness stuff and Whispery Jigging gigs, but there’s been no public denunciation by her publishers, no withdrawal of prizes, no legal action etc. Keeping schtum has served her well.

Thanks for mentioning this. An interesting read. Here is a link to get behind paywall.

smry.ai/www.telegraph.co.uk/books/non-fiction/amy-griffin-the-tell-sexual-abuse-memoir

Yes, dishonesty and emotional manipulation have won the day - and they have done it in plain sight throughout, as below. I think Sal and Tim have always been having a very triumphant laugh at everyone else ... and eventually, it was all the way to the bank!

"nothing is as it seems, and every story changes in the light of the readers viewpoint." Izzy Wyn-Thomas, Gangani Publishing, 2012

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. Raynor Winn, TSP, 2018

"This idea runs throughout the book. The main female character, Ellias, is cleverer than anyone else .." Chloe Hadjimatheou on HNTDDD, 2026

Agree! Another couple of pertinent quotes to add:

‘Justice? Could tell him a thing or two about justice.’ The statue is a cross-section of a pregnant women. One side whole, the other side showing the baby in the womb. She’s holding a sword aloft and the scales of justice behind her back. ‘No wonder she’s hiding the scales. Hide the truth behind a front that distracts the eye. It’s a true representation of British justice. Anyone can have it, if they can afford to tip the scales.’ (TSP, 2018)

People recoiled and the wind was silenced by their sharp intake of breath. In every case the conversation ended abruptly and the other party walked away very quickly. So we had invented a lie that was more palatable. (TSP, 2018)

I once heard a lecture by Stephen Hawking, when he said, ‘It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it we lose our identity.’ Maybe I was trying to lose my identity, so I could invent a new one. (TSP, 2018)

Fascinating - I know that statue, Verity (truth in Latin) by Damien Hirst in Ilfracombe, very well, let's just say deep ancestral connections. But not the quote. She tells us everything all along - it's part of her fun ....

You added another one .... just, wow!

It's more that they invented a lie that was more profitable, though.

I mean, the lie is in many ways terribly dark, if we take out the warm and fuzzies about wild nature and the salt wind etc -- a terminal diagnosis in the same week as an unfair legal judgement based on your misunderstanding about how new evidence must be presented deprives you of your home, after you've trustingly invested with an old friend, and you're completely alone in the world apart from a tent, and must drag yourself out on a famously difficult long distance path with a husband barely able to walk? Dark indeed.

Whereas the real story appears to involve not bothering to work for many years, buying lots of lovely things and a farmhouse in France, escaping largely unscathed from a crime that could have involved significant jail time via your own persuasiveness, and being forgiven by enough family members from whom you've thieved large sums to have them house you at their own expense for long periods of time, during which you frequently go on walking holidays, surfing etc.

Yes, very profitable - at the expense of a very nice employer and his family and family members. The Observer did reproduce a handwritten letter, to Sal's mother, saying that she could not repay her at the moment but did not mean to hurt her. It is in the online "Don't look for the money ..." article.

The deviousness is often the opposite of the truth. This quote made me smile, ironically, they are the snatchers:

it's easy to find that everyday life has become a matter of habit and ritual, centred around the framework of home and work; a secure existence that most of us spend our lives constructing. That life had been snatched from us

https://www.newsweek.com/salt-path-raynor-winn-1351320

Also ironic in that they never did create that supposedly secure existence through work. Theft, fraud and manipulation doesn’t count as work.

No. Work is the real bogeyman of the Walkers' lives, it seems, not being too trusting of old friends, the 'prejudice' of homelessness, or being stalked by a terrible degenerative condition.

Agree with everything you’ve all been posting with such brilliance. Every single article pre Chloe is a sickening work of a Machiavellian mind in my view. I know loads don’t agree with me on this but the evidence really stacks up. Chloe said of course she didn’t know it was going to be a bestseller otherwise we’d all be writing them, but I stick to my gut feeling because not ‘everyone’ is Sally Walker who has no qualms about lying, manipulating, plagiarising or ruthlessly using people. She’s even (as Brandy and Money have quoted) enjoyed messing with the readers’ heads by projecting her own shady ways onto others as though to judge them. The woman makes my stomach churn. Not a single word from “Moth” either, who after all could be coming forth and making a statement. We ALL know that the story in all the books is false upon false so why is he still hiding behind her skirts? She will never back down. Her last stupid statement has been stripped bare and to anyone who hasn’t read the books or analysed her preachings will just come across as ‘fair’ no doubt. It contains nothing of substance, just the minimal requirements, a minute, grain of sand truth … being that they didn’t have the house. Big Deal. To anyone who has been living under a rock, that sounds like truth. To us it means she’s still not prepared to give up this lie and Moth won’t either. My concern now is that this strong denial means that they are still working hard to repair their brand and will continue with the Wellness idea. These retreats are very popular in Cornwall and you can pay from £70 a day for meditation, swim, a mindfulness walk, some food, a craft or writers workshop of some kind. She has ZERO interest in people’s wellbeing but she is so good at pretending she does. She plays the victim card over and over, like any good narcissist worth their salt.

What makes a bestseller for Sally Walker:
First read up on other people’s books on the same subject. What she learned from Mark Wallington books is a certain style of self deprecating humour and a few running jokes throughout. In Mark’s case he was making his journeys for the hell of it, for the experience. His whole outlook is therefore completely different to that of a terminally ill, recently homeless and penniless person. When Sally copies his upbeat style of writing and turns themselves into stooges, the reader thinks awwww they’re sooo optimistic and brave, even under those conditions! I at least didn’t automatically think how odd it seemed. Of course, she preempts any sort of question about the state of their mental health by telling us that The Path was their salvation and cure. Mark’s books were published in the 1980s and I’d never read them until recently. I’d never come across them before she mentioned one of them in TSP. How brazen to mention a book that you have copied from!
Recently we’ve been wondering when the homelessness and terminal illness became such strong features in the books. Was it before or after meeting Julie? There’s no doubt that those two aspects were an intriguing mix that helped the book become a bestseller. The book contains a triumphant message with everybody clamouring to read about how it was possible. Not many people would willingly lie about homelessness and having a terminal illness but she manages to. The doctor’s tentative diagnosis in 2015 was exploited when retrofitted into TSP narrative. Exploited beyond measure. In her IG post (screenshotted and shared upthread) following the Thames walk for the PSP charity, Sally still uses Moth as an example of someone with CBD. “For others like Moth”, she says. Moth doesn’t have CBD and she knew this. They just piggybacked on that charity to look like good guys. That sort of behaviour has been done before.
This post has turned into a bit of a ramble.. but my main point is that she collected together a lot of research before writing TSP and presenting it as something naive and tied up with string as a further way to channel the humble bragging, instagrammable, rustic, quaint - core thing. The notebook style, scrap book ‘thing’ is like an artist’s sketchbook or a mindful diary. It’s very popular. I don’t know if that was her idea though or her daughter’s or the publisher’s. We are told it was something wrapped in brown paper and written at a kitchen table when it was presented and it went through the publishing house and emerged as a swan. That’s all part of the brand image in which her reinvented self also becomes Raynor Winn. The rather nasty little Sally Walker becomes a spokesperson for all sorts of causes and the longevity of her marriage to Moth also stands out as something inspiring.

I don’t know about wellness retreats. The ‘Raynor Winn’ brand is pretty tarnished, so while I suppose it’s possible they could do it by themselves in a house they owned, I’m not sure anyone with a suitable venue for hire or an interest in investing in a wellness business is going to be crazy about being associated with a known conwoman and thief.

I don’t know how well Bill Cole is known in Cornwall generally, but I’d assume local people will be aware of the Walkers’ moonlight flit from Haye Farm, and other people with minor collateral damage like the Treen and St Ives’ campsites and the cafe with the (imaginary) sweary, unpleasant owner and Ruth Saberton, and the young couple who did the actual cider making at Haye, all of whom would know the Walkers as business poison.

And, if they did do wellness stuff entirely by themselves, unless it’s so lowkey it’s almost not there, they’d be pumping money into something for a very uncertain return. They’ve only got SW’s royalties now, as far as we know, unless they made some v savvy investments, they’re paying rent, and OWH is looking doubtful. Gigspanner aren’t going to have her back, and I’d be surprised if Arvon or any other opportunity for teaching writing would touch her with a barge pole now.

And even aside from the money stuff, would SW really risk someone asking awkward questions about theft and neurological conditions during a breath work session or a seaweed bath?

And even aside from the money stuff, would SW really risk someone asking awkward questions about theft and neurological conditions during a breath work session or a seaweed bath?

This is a very good point. I can't see how she can expose herself to the public in any kind of forum again, whether that's providing 'wellness' to paying punters or promoting a book or taking part in a charity fundraiser. Anyone could be a reporter looking for a chance to ask awkward questions.

I agree with both of you, but she’s so clever at manipulating people, especially the ones who saw real good in her, who still see Raynor Winn, not Sally Walker. I imagine she could be popular with visitors to Cornwall rather than the people in the local area and with anyone who has not read all of the stories post July ‘25 or who have read some but have taken a forgiving route. Not forgetting that she hasn’t been publicly dumped by Penguin and some people will see that as being very favourable.
Yes, I also think that journalists would want a ticket, or anybody who wants to secretly observe Moth.

I'm surprised how little reporting there has been on this, and how many people (including readers) still don't know about it. IIRC, to this day anyone having a quick look on Wikipedia would see that "RW" is a "long-distance walker" who wrote a "memoir", and that one journalist has taken issue about a couple of things that form the background to her memoir.

When I discussed with a close family member the other day, they had read the book but knew next to nothing about the rest.

On the question of whether it was expected that TSP would be a best-seller (which has been raised many times in these threads), a very large amount of PRH effort, time and money went into graphic design, posters and other advertising, piles of books on front tables, and vast amounts of PR. My inpression is that (no doubt with the benefit of market research) PRH aimed and expected to make TSP a best-seller, and that TSP will have formed an important item in the publisher's business plan, long before the book was actually printed and sold.

That said, I defer to those of you who are in the industry and will be better placed to reach an informed opinion.

Yes I was like you still annoyed that her job on Wikipedia is long-distance walker. I looked a few days ago and saw that it had been updated, but a month ago. I couldn't then find anything different but then saw that the 7 podcasts from The Observer have been added - so that's great.. but anyone out there who is a Wiki editor please give it a good going over!

A new post on Insta. A lone tree, leafless, twisted, bare, ‘its branches shaped by years of wind and weather’.

Maybe TW has left her for the dog groomer.