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

Cheers. Already a bit of an odd back story... Staffordshire is hardly down town LA and it's a strange reason to move to Wales having given up your job with no where and nothing to go to. I wonder what happened to the money from the sale of their house?

So a botanist who becomes a "master" plasterer...no mention of qualifications in plastering then.

Yes, there are some strange anomalies in this account. They do tell a lot of stories but also journalists get things wrong. He couldn't have been a botanist as he does a horticultural degree in Cornwall from 2015.

Jobs and money are always a mystery with the Walkers ....

There is a photo of Moth at a Trig point in Dorset on the SWCP walk, but not at Golden Cap.

In this one he is at Ballard Down just outside Swanage where Sal and Moth camped on the first night after setting off from South Haven Point.

Moth looks pretty chipper in the photo yet in TSP Sal describes Moth siting on a rock at Ballard Down having taken 4 pain killers while Sal rubs his shoulders with a Chinese herbal balm she had found in a herbal shop.

Moth is clean shaven and is wearing the same clothes as at the SWCP finish/start marker point at South Haven Point.

He was a plasterer (with his dad's company in Burton) before a "botanist". It has been discussed long ago that his botany credentials are very likely invented.

Eta. Sal has said many times in interviews they had a dream to restore an old ruin, though reasons for Wales remain inconsistent. Once it was because a traffic jam on holiday saw them randomly arrive there, another was the story of the infant son escaping their Forest Row home. Then we see in her confession it was because they couldn't afford anywhere else because Tim lost half the capital of the house sale to a (most likely made up) investment.

Dorset doesn't figure largely in the interviews that Sal has given about TSP but this is one interview she gave in 2019.

From tragedy to transcendence - Dorset LifeDorset Life - The Dorset Magazine

Well she certainly wouldn't be given 'tramp' status there. More like the late Debo, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire @ThompsonTwin

@DisappointedReader Our Simon could well have a worthy successor in the making! Love it, thank you

TBH Salray did miss a trick not making what ailed Timoth eg depression. Equally scabby ploy if untrue but far more credible to be helped by exercise in nature and although it wouldn't have wiped out the financial lies it would have been one less issue to be questioned.

I come over all irrationally rage filled at the numerous, don't -make-sense pics of Timoth looking and behaving as if he is in radiant health when the 'official version' suggests the opposite. A MH reason would also explain why he could plank on trig points and generally caper like a young mountain goat, of course.

My fury is possibly aggravated by the fact I've got some sort of gland/throat thing ATM (not mumps, had it 50+ years ago) and look like a diseased bullfrog.

Ribbet.

Worth highlighting that on the same day that these two photos were taken, Sal writes in TSP:

Moth hunched under the weight of his pack, muscles receding against the incoming tau. Confusion washing over him in waves, falling quietly like a sandcastle in the water running before the tide. The start of the mental decline that accompanies CBD. We had over two months with nowhere to go and Moth’s health was at its lowest point so far

Two observations - Moth looks extremely healthy in both photos, he isn't carrying a heavy rucksack, certainly not equipped for an 8 week walk back to Polruan.... My hunch is the photos were taken in 2016 and they just walked for a fortnight from Poole to West Bay with D&J

One gem that leapt out was Sal's comment about the end of the 2013 walk:

when the nights became too cold for wild camping, they reluctantly decided to spend the winter in a friend’s shed

This is adding insult to injury after the niece, Anne, putting them up after the shocking way they treated her grandmother and the manipulative way Sally wrote to her mother.

Both families seem really nice and have been treated in the most despicable way. Cecille sobbing when she finally gets to speak to Chloe after having this pent up emotion over their treatment all those years. Anne saying: I just wanted to make sure nobody else ....thinks they can walk themselves better.

I bet all the time she was writing that codswallop she was sniggering to herself.
“The start of the mental decline that accompanies CBD.”
Once they’d decided what disease he was going to have, I suppose the googling of it began in earnest and she started fitting in the symptoms here and there throughout the book. How would this affect Moth? What would my feelings be like?
Sadly, on the Wikipedia entry for CBD underneath the sub header ‘Society and Culture’, TSP has a mention and that RW ‘claims’ her husband has CBD.

I share that feeling and there’s nothing irrational about it at all. It’s perfectly understandable. It might not be very zen-like but the old fashioned way of dealing with it would be to stick a picture of the offending numpties onto a dartboard. She has got some gall to play out those emotions on the page and pretend they’re real.

ETA: sorry to hear you’re very unwell again 😞

I can't prove it, but I suspect that Sal and Moth may have walked no more than 340 miles (ie just over 50%) of the SWCP over 4 years:

• 190 miles in 2013 from Minehead to LE getting a lift from Newquay to St Ives with their son
• 77 miles in 2014/15 from LE to Falmouth and vice versa
• 75 miles in 2016 from Poole to West Bay

There are photos of the 2013 walk and of the 2016 walk from Poole to West Bay but none of the stretch between West Bay and Porthallow apart from one photo at St Adelaide's Chapel at Penlee Point, possibly taken in late Aug 2016 on a weekend walk.

God, that's annoying. As is this:

When I ask if he is working, Raynor becomes mysterious: ‘He’s doing something, all of which will be revealed in my follow-up book.’

Big woo-hoo. Especially as the answer appears to be 'Making brush piles, failing to make cider, and throwing a tantrum when the landlord tries to buy in some help.'

This may give you some idea of the type of accommodation Sal and Tim enjoyed at Polly's for 18 months.

It definitely wasn't a shed!

Those posed photos are always interesting. TW looks happy, hale and hearty in every photo that we have seen. I wonder if the wider family have ever seen him looking unwell? They seemed sure that they didn’t need to worry about his health. His parents were possibly worried about no one being there to look after him if SW went to prison, or the stress debilitating him further. We aren’t given the impression that he has ever been great at standing on his own two feet. If you’ll forgive the pun! I imagine he was always a worry to them.

It is SW who looks less robust and full of joy. Someone has already said, I think, that she is the small bird trying to cope with the incessant appetite of a cuckoo. He appears to be both her life’s work and her undoing. With her lack of identity, self control and moral compass she seems to have been an easy win. Aargh, that was unintentional by the way! This saga is getting to me!

It seems very likely to me that you are correct. I was very disappointed that the many lovely stretches of South Devon barely got a mention.
Most of the photos look like they were taken on a day hike on a sunny day. All to prove they were there.

Thank you for setting it out - my feeling is that your estimate is very generous!

Without photos I wonder if they have been to a lot of it at all. An example would be the silly story about the American woman trying to find John Le Carré's house every year when it is right next to the path. I suppose the info from the Minack, the next year, and Tadge confirming he saw them, but we don't know when, indicates they have been in that area.

For anyone who knows the areas, that they mention, there is a strong whiff of inauthenticity.

They may just have met somebody in a cafe (Lamorna Cove?) who told them that John Le Carre lived next to the path which they had just walked. So they made the rest of it up! They were at Treen campsite (Tadge saw them there) and in the photo of the PD guide to the SWCP which is open at the Porthcurno to Mousehole section, there is a bookmark protruding on the previous page which appears to be a postcard of the Minack Theatre.

You must have excellent eyesight! Even when I stretch that picture I can’t see what’s stuck in the pages except pixels.
The possible accommodation… what are these pictures?

If you download the photo of the PD guide to the SWCP from the Penguin website (Where the Salt Path led next), save and enlarge the photo (JPEG), you should be able to make out the Minack logo on the previous page and the words Murray King (based in St Ives who produced postcards of the Minack).

As for the photos of the accommodation at Polly's, call it sleuthing without revealing the exact location of where they stayed but giving a pretty good representation of what it looked like.

Where the Salt Path led next

@TheBookShelf : "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)."

Impressive! My memory of Blake's 7 penal colonies ends at Cygnus Alpha. Avon out.

That is seriously impressive!

I think you should both go on Mastermind! Round 1 Special Subject Blakes 7 Round 2: The Salt Path

Fred Housego eat your heart out!

Thank you very much! I’ve saved it to look. I haven’t read this article since before Chloe… goodness me… it really needs a re-write. Reading that, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ray and Moth are the salts of the earth, a lovely couple, hard working, deserving, kind and beautiful but that tragic fate hangs over them and yet it doesn’t affect their disposition or dampen their zest for life. You think wow… they’re amazing, what a wonderful attitude to have, just stare death in the face and say “Not today Death! I’m making heritage cider and pretending to look busy!”

They ask what you think of that article and invite you to let them know 😀