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

I don't see the admission that Salray wrote HNTDDD as Izzy WT as being particularly major. I think she already admitted it back in her July statement:

In desperation, we briefly tried running a book-based house raffle like others had done, but quickly realised it was a mistake as it clearly wasn’t going to work. We cancelled it and refunded the few participants.

@Glitterbiscuits I feel very sorry for their adult kids.

I don't know whether or not they deserve our sympathy at this point. I started off feeling very sorry for them but have become less sure over time. We know they have had some involvement in Salt Path Industries, given lifts, deleted SM posts and so on. We can't be sure either way how much involvement and knowledge they had of the deceit nor whether they have knowingly benefitted from it.

Yes, she very carefully avoided actually admitting that she wrote it though. At that stage it could have been anyone in her circle.

I was under the impression OC had nailed the lid of that coffin down, but just didn't outright divulge how she knew. I agree with @DisappointedReader that it is hardly a revelation now. The fact the Mars bar dipped in tea was repeated in HNTDDD and TSP was enough for me, and far more compelling a discovery than the BBC's entire episode 2 being summed up as: "and after all that, Winn's lawyers told us".

ETA: from OC's "don't look for the money" piece. It is definitively reported here.

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/dont-look-for-the-money-ive-taken-it-all-raynor-winns-confession-that-she-stole-from-her-family

As part of the recent investigation, The Observer discovered that in 2012, five years prior to the publication of The Salt Path, Winn wrote another book. How Not to Dal dy Dir (“hold your ground” in Welsh) is a novel – not a memoir – and was written under another of Sally Walker’s pseudonyms: Izzy Wyn-Thomas. It’s the only title released by Gangani Publishing, a business she and Moth set up when they lived in Wales and it’s likely only about 250 copies were printed.

Thanks to everyone for explaining about the prize. I would have thought the overlap between TSP and HNTDDD would have / should have disqualified it even if a previously self-published work was not against the rules.

Do NOT get me started again....

I think PSPA are in a different situation to the CB Prize in that a charity like PSPA is concerned with fundraising for research and support for people with a horrible, rare, incurable disease and their carers and families. Even leaving aside that the people it’s concerned with actually have the disease it seems overwhelmingly likely TW knowingly cosplayed, the charity is heavily dependent on volunteers and their fundraising efforts, people committing to running marathons or leaving bequests etc — they need to have the absolute trust of everyone involved, and the absolute knowledge that all moneys raised go where the charity says they go.

Their statement, which followed immediately on the Observer story, didn’t say ‘We think Moth is faking’, just that ‘too many questions remain unanswered’, and therefore it was terminating its relationship with ‘the family’.

But I think the real point was that it went on to assure donors that all funds raised by the Walkers had been done via credible funding platforms and received in full. They were, I think, as much or more concerned with it being alleged the Walkers were big time thieves and embezzlers as they were with whether TW was faking having CBD.

For the CB Prize it’s first and foremost a matter of whether an author lied about something being their debut.

For PSPA, it’s a matter of whether donors continue to trust it with their money in the knowledge that two people with a record of significant theft are among its high-profile fundraisers. Belle Gibson is alleged to have only passed on a fraction of her supposed funds raised to the cancer charity she was supposedly supporting.

I bet PSPA were incredibly relieved they’d axed them so fast when the December 2025 further story and podcast came out. Stealing from a well-disposed charity grateful for a high-profile person bringing publicity to an obscure disease would seem like an obvious next step.

I mean, you might say ‘But they didn’t need to steal by then’ — but they didn’t bother paying Bill Cole’s utility bills when they could easily afford them.

Spot on as usual @SableGules ! They can’t be trusted at all, not for anything. They’re greedy too and they’d have justified it to themselves somehow.

Just listened to the first 2 BBC podcasts (on the Sounds app) and at the end of the second one, a local Welsh bard who’s involved throughout as a storyteller and interpreter of stories, reminds us of the plethora of stories in which outsiders are welcomed but then steal from or betray their hosts; and also of those stories in which gifts are often given, and if they’re respected then all is well. But if the gift is disrespected, it can vanish. Food for thought for SalRay and Timmoth?

The PSPA dropped them at the first opportunity, I think they already had misgivings about Tim's health status before CHs revaluations, they hadn't profited to the extent that PRH and others have either. They had more to gain by preserving their integrity with their members and the wider community, as you say @SableGules it was in the charities interest to dissociate themselves. It is evident that PRH don't feel they owe their readers anything, presumably the RSL are not that fussed about it either, they can't be worrying about financial implications or reputational damage.

@SableGules
For the CB Prize it’s first and foremost a matter of whether an author lied about something being their debut.

Oh dear, that's done it - someone fan me down...

I've just been listening to the BBC podcast Secrets of the Salt Path & realised that the narrator is Aimee-Ffion Edwards aka Shirley Dander in Slow Horses.

Indeed. This, and the fact TSP was not as claimed or advertised as an inspirational true story. One struggles to see how the judging panel would still consider any merit of the work in light of the many falsehoods.

I'm still thinking through the subject, shared above, and one of the categories I wanted to include was Women Writers. I didn't think any were mentioned in TSP, though, so that was no good. We had discussed Cheryl Strayed, Wild, previously, as she describes having very little food at times and Sal describes herself as "starving". The dates are perfect - book 2012, film 2014 but not referenced by Sal.

What I remembered is that @ThompsonTwin shared a social media message from another writer they were reading. This is Sal's ungracious take on her:

A woman called Phoebe Smith wrote Extreme Sleeps about wild camping at every extremity of Britain, north, south, east and west. At the most southerly point she waited until it was dark, unrolled her bivvy bag and had an unsurprisingly bad night’s sleep on a ledge above the waves, then up with the lark, or probably the gulls, a quick walk up the coast and back into the car, off to the next extreme rocky outcrop. I wished I was having a nice meal, then unrolling my bivvy without a care, knowing that however wet or cold I got, it wasn’t going to last

So she gets added to my list of Influences:

Phoebe Smith
She says: Back in August 2017 I received an email from Raynor Winn. She's written a book then called Lightly Salted Blackberries - and in it, in a single sentence, mentioned me and my book Extreme Sleeps about the time when I camped at Lizard Point (on the SWCP). The remark was one about the lucky situation I had been in, compared to her and Moth
(more of this above in Thread Gallery 15/02/2026 @ThompsonTwin )

DT article

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/1c447f18d9ef1b4a

Other articles to boot

How The Salt Path author continues to face allegations of lies and betrayal | The Independent

The Salt Path author published earlier book under alias, despite debut claims | Books | The Guardian

Thank you.

I think the oversight in the CB prize allowing self published books to 'not count' as a first book was truly dreadful but at least they have corrected it now and the world knows that TSP was not SalRay's first book. I know most people won't get the fuss, but if you've self published a book you've got a better idea of the publishing and marketing processes than a true first-timer and can therefore better tailor a subsequent book to the market. So it gives you an unfair advantage (which is why, I would guess, they now have made self published books count as a first book CB prize-wise).

Interesting to see that The Telegraph's article had 50 comments, and that the people who commented seemed to be aware of the backgeound.

Haha I just saw an article about the new coastal path and was wondering if anyone had posted about it already 😂😂

Hi, new to this thread. Been listening to the BBC Wales podcast.

I heard this. It strikes me this is their problem overall. They’re extractive. They arrive in places with the perspective of what they can get out of them. It’s like a sort of colonialist attitude. Reminds me of an ilk of people who went to live in southern Spain after reading Driving Over Lemons.

I haven’t read the book (didn’t appeal) but did research it for work reasons, just before the film was released (which I watched). There was a lot made of it showing people what it’s like to be homeless. But, as the couple from Essex say in the podcast, it didn’t ring true to me. Especially how their homelessness ended. Then hearing about the email to the Big Issue, it’s like they tried to extract what they could from the homelessness angle - it gave them an entry point. It’s one of the biggest social issues of the day.

That’s why the Welsh myth of taking the bowl of gold resonated with me. It’s wanting to take something other people have been humble and generous enough to share with you - seeing it as a commodity.

Though I wonder if Orwell (though I love his writing) would’ve hit the same problems with Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier in this digital age. People popping up to say that’s not my truth. It’s poverty porn.

^ Sorry, quote-replied wrong person. That was meant to be to @Holdinguphalfthesky .

Hi, welcome and thanks for a great contribution. Yes, the Walkers always "asset strip" wherever they are, as quoted as one of the 'attributes' of Izzy Wyn-Thomas.

BBC Wales Ep.3 The Walk

The Essex couple are so nice and so perceptive about them. I am a SWCP native and I appreciated Andy and Jo commenting on all the moaning when you are in someone else's land. Interesting that they, Andy and Jo, read the book as they walked and Jo says: "I think she had a hidden agenda and I think she'd been planning this for quite some time."

An interesting comment on Reddit.

Yeah, the cultural appropriation is appalling with that first book, especially the pseudonym.

Trying to flog the bowl of gold, when it’s not theirs to sell.