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 usual vacuous tosh. The lone tree figures in a previous IG post and is near Porlock Marsh on the SWCP.

On the strength of the success of the books, she might still be able to sell 'How to Write A Bestseller' courses.

Of course, the joke there is that NOBODY knows how to write a bestseller, so it's utterly pointless to hold such courses. Books are made by word of mouth and reader reaction OR by publishers deciding that your book will be there new List Leader, whereupon they will pour advertising resources into it to make it a best seller. So courses purporting to tell you how to write bestsellers, even if hosted by people who've written same, are only ever going to be 'how to write' courses (and the bestseller list will likely have moved on by the time you've finished your book anyway).

But there are enough desperate new writers out there who might fall for the promise of being told how to write an equivalent successful book as TSP and therefore won't care about the moralities of the contents. They just want to be told how to replicate the magic (which Sal, of course, is one of the least people in the world to be qualified to teach).

Their - I was so incensed that my grammar deserted me for a moment.

Sally does tell us a lot really, including the following:

The Salt Path - The Influences 2013-2017

500 Mile Walkies
@HatStickBoots said about this book earlier. I have sometimes posted a few paragraphs from TSP next to 500MW to show I think it has just been rephrased. When others have posted extracts re: tramps, recoiling from them - I always hear echoes of Mark and Boogie.

Paddy Dillon SWCP guidebook
I have wondered how much is just lifted from this? It gives the continuity in a patchwork of so many themes and tangents. He has a new version coming out this month. Interesting that on his website it says: "This is the guidebook that featured as a prop throughout "TSP" film." No mention of the book.

Simon Armitage
His forthcoming walk on the north coast and The Scilly Isles was publicised in an article in The Guardian and the SWCP site in 2013. Book, Walking Away, published 2015.

Project Manager, Caritas Care
A good source of info for a writer who has lost her house and is staying with family. The articles in mags for the homeless/awareness of homelessness (2017) and the description of the woodland homeless community is described with knowledge and relevant buzz words.

Australian couple
Jo and David Parsons, met in 2015 at Fat Apples cafe, who had suffered the setback of an illness, consequently were homeless and were actually walking the whole SWCP. The Walkers told them about Moth's health but Jo emailed to ask why didn't you say you were homeless?

Thank you for this, there’s so much I should have included and didn’t. It’s so distressing.

Hang on a minute, wind IS weather, surely? 😆

Also, it doesn't really look like a wind shaped tree - certainly not a good example of wind-shaped growth, which is usually very obvious due to branching away from the prevailing wind. 2/10 for observation and description Sal.

The tree does get a mention in TSP:

We crossed the marshlands, where the sea had broken through the shingle edge and turned the farmland into salt marsh.The skeletons of white, salt-burnt trees stark against the grey sky. Dead but still inhabiting life.

A small point but the sky in Sal's IG photo which features same tree, is anything but grey. There we go. She had the photo for reference but obviously thought the image of the skeletons of the white salt burnt trees against a grey sky was better for dramatic effect with its allusion to death and Moth struggling with CBD.

More good old emotional manipulation methinks.

Just listened to ep1 (The Dreamers) of the BBC Wales Secrets of the Salt Path podcast. No huge revelations other than the claim that Tim left his NT job in 2004 for a French renovation project and that they bought the property in the Village de Dropt in 2007 for 50,000 euros.That seems an awful lot of money for what looks like an uninhabitable wreck..

Thanks ... I kept looking. We'll have to put it at the beginning of our posts, like you have, again. They have released all 9 x half hour episodes - so people will vary in how much they can listen to.

All nine episodes can be found on BBC Sounds. It looks like only the first episode is available on Apple Podcasts.

Odd that she keeps just reposting old images. Surely she can find good photography subject on the sprawling estate they are hiding in. Seems like she is a ghost of her own making, stuck in a former time and pretending Raynor Winn is still a viable persona.

She might, I suppose, but she’d have to market herself, I think — I don’t think any of the big ‘teaching writing’ brands like Arvon or Granta or Faber, at least the serious ones, would necessarily want to be associated with a memoirist about whom there’s a drip-drip of information about criminal activity and fake diagnoses.

And surely, if teaching how to construct a best-selling memoir, she’d have to deal with the awkward question of if and how you rearrange and selectively omit real-life events to construct your narrative…?

Unless they’ve escaped to the Caribbean!

@ThompsonTwin : "50,000 euros ... seems an awful lot of money for what looks like an uninhabitable wreck". IIRC, one of the CH podcasts had soneone saying that the French house (aka chateau) was habitable, but they stopped going because it would have meant having to face family, and it fell into ruin.

Mumsnet is now showing me ads for Land Rover Defenders. No doubt not a coincidence. Perhaps ads for chateaux will be coming soon.

Or wellness retreats.

Or high-end bandanas and powder-blue Agas.

Get-away flights to the British Virgin Islands?

I wondered about this myself. It is a very poetic photo if you ignore the elephant standing right next to it and as you say, it was taken at a different time, an earlier time.
You’re absolutely right about the ghost of Raynor Winn! Sally Walker has a habit of turning the other way, ignoring things and hoping they will go away. I think she’s a very angry person when things don’t go her way. It was ok for fictional Raynor to show anger because there was a force of ‘good’ at its source and you got the impression that after a lifetime of doggery (is that a word??) or drudgery that it was a positive thing and helped to power her forward. Well no, it wasn’t. Her anger is just petulant rage at not getting what she wants or having it taken away.
Indeed, there continues to be to be no posts about Moth and his good days and bad days because those only feature in the books she writes. Why give away all that for free? Besides, he doesn’t have CBD or Parkinson’s. There is nothing to see, nothing to tell.

We should invent The Salt Path board game.

BBC Wales Secrets of the Salt Path Ep. 1

You find Sal's car near a railway junction. There is a note criticizing the investigation.

Do we move forwards - or go back to the beginning? 😁

Beginner writers are often so desperate to be shown the inner secrets of the publishing industry (aka 'how you write a best seller') which they are convinced exist and are currently preventing them from being published, that they would happily sign up for courses written by a memoirist even if they want to write fiction.

And it would be fairly easy to market it as herself. Adverts in classy magazines and some of the writing mags. There are still plenty of people, seemingly, who don't care what she did, or are prepared to overlook it, or who have fallen for the 'she wouldn't still be published if it was all true' line.

I just listened to the first two episodes. Glad the BBC credited OC and the Observer. It seems to me that this podcast is less about the investigating side (which was OC’s 100%) and more about the genesis of Sally and Tim. The Welsh side is fascinating. What is clear already is how cynically they have manipulated the reader and the media from the start. I was fascinated to learn that Tim was always a customer in the book shop in Wales but not ‘book lover’ Sally. Could Tim be the brains of the novel writing con? He was hidden away and so had plenty of time to write while she fronts the operation/gig spans/ does interviews/lit fests etc

After all, what was he doing after the book hit the big time) ( NOT making cider for Bill Coles!)

This production seems to reinforce the manufactured element of this fairytale which can only be a good thing in terms of getting the truth out there. With the BBC’s reach added to OC’s work I don’t imagine there is any way back now for the pair.

@HatStickBoots : "a lifetime of doggery (is that a word??)". I'm not sure. "Dogging" is a word, but I don't think it's what you mean.