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 completely agree @HatStickBoots It isn’t as if it is trivial either. These lies were/are about supposedly alleviating a terminal illness and are not to be conveniently swept under the carpet. What the criminal activities reveal is that this couple just don’t care. In the AMA I asked OC if she had been contacted by anyone who said that the WWs had made reparations for wrongful acts before her initial reveal. She said that nobody had.

ETA I meant apologies that were not as a result of the recent publicity.

Yes, it is truly astonishing how they can turn themselves into victims and I don’t think anything can prepare us for it. Once our eyes are open to it though it makes it possible to realise that there are people who stand outside the accepted morals. That these twists and turns are how they conduct relationships. And that these people may appear ‘nice’ at a superficial level. The WWs even managed to make BC, the kindest of men, into supposedly their persecutor, who TW raged at and they had to ‘escape’ from.

Yesterday evening I listened to a talk via Zoom, given by a museum curator - geology/natural history was her expertise. She described a scenario where a museum wanted to set up a display case featuring lions and so a lion skull was on the "wanted list". But lion skulls are, we were told, hard to come by and therefore expensive. The museum did, however, own a tiger skull and the proposed use of which in the display gave rise to some serious discussion! (The differences are so slight that only an expert would notice the substitution.)
Apparently museum visitors were quizzed on whether the use of a tiger's skull as a stand-in for a lion's would be acceptable. The vast majority thought not - if a museum made a habit of labelling an item on display incorrectly, this would call into question the accuracy of anything else labelled in that institution.
It reminded me of TSP's non-fiction label. Those who found the story inspiring say it doesn't matter. But, like the museum visitors (whom I'm sure expect all labels to be accurate) I say it does matter.
BTW the talk was concluded before I could enquire as to the outcome - did they go ahead and use the tiger's skull or go for a complete rethink?

I suspect Sally is as hard as nails too @Innermagnolia . I can’t see how else she manages to rationalise all this stuff. The fantasy she built around Moth’s illness was so convincing that it almost worked as camouflage to deter the reader from finding out the truth - all the details such as trauma, mistrust, losing everything, the bravery that they were forced into because Moth wasn’t sick enough to be pushed up the council housing list. Anything and everything just distracted from the basic fact that someone with that disease would not have been able to physically walk that path and on the teetering high and narrow parts when his limbs would be trembling and shaking and he had no balancing abilities would you want him to?? He didn’t even have a stick. Carrying that rucksack? I don’t know why I believed it but I knew nothing about CBD at the time and accepted what she wrote because I just didn’t think that somebody would lie about something like that.

Obviously, I don't know in regard to the Walkers, but I think some people feel like they deserve things, that they're entitled to them - that they should have what other people have.

And so, in some way, they don't feel guilty about taking them, and re-writing the story about how that happens, because intrinsically they felt those things should already be theirs. In effect, you can't take something that belongs to you already. It was just unfair that they didn't already have those things.

@UpfromSomerset : if the museum had asked me, I would have said: "if there's a note explaining why you used a tiger skull instead of a lion one, that would be fine with me. But not OK to pretend."

I've done a bit of analysis to try and work out how much of the SWCP Sal and Tim did actually walk based on the photos they took of their walk (which appeared in Sal's IG feed) and various magazine articles) and what is described in TSP

• the walk itself is described in 216 pages
• there are 31 photos of the walk
• the section between Minehead and LE and Poole to West Bay accounts for 70% of the walk that is described in TSP
• however those stretches only account for 250 miles of the SWCP (less than 40% of the total)
• all the photos come from those 240 miles and apart from the photo at the FAC, one at Porthallow and St Adelaide's chapel, thee are no photos of around 380 miles of the SWCP!
• it begs the question as to why Sal didn't take photos of these stretches of the SWCP. The logical answer is that she didn't walk many of them!

Thank you for setting out the evidence for the walk @ThompsonTwin . Whenever I've dipped into TSP it has always read like that. I still feel there are ideas and rephrased passages copied from 500MW. I have put 500MW in bold and TSP in italics.

You need to get two ferries to continue the coast path from Falmouth. This reads to me as if the Walkers haven't been there. They have already protested that they are only foot passengers - everyone is, on both ferries. What Mark describes is perfectly feasible - I have travelled there by sea, many times. What Sally describes, on Falmouth harbour, is make believe:

We reached St Mawes and I strolled around the waterfront trying to beg a lift over to Place.

We walked away from the ferry and hung around the harbour trying to find a private boat going over to St Mawes
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Another one is being called a tramp - which always stands out as incongruous in TSP with these two middle-aged holidaymakers. 500MW has Mark camped just off the coast path and a family bump into his guyropes:

The children buried themselves in their mother's skirt....And then the whole family backed away and made an unsubtle detour round me. There was much whispering and I heard the word tramp mentioned once or twice.
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The National Trust now owned about a third of the Cornish and Devon coast.

Slowly though, local feeling had become embittered. No-one liked the National Trust making the rules. The locals claimed that Cornwall was now in tune with the visitors 'needs rather than their own, and that they, the natives, knew how best to manage their own land.

We’d heard mutterings amongst the locals of a dislike for the National Trust who own over a third of the coastline of Devon and Cornwall, bought by Project Neptune to save the coastline from development. There were complaints that the Trust are too restrictive and don’t understand the need of local people to make a living.

---------
My nose in particular was suffering. Everywhere I went I left bits of it behind. My original one had shed itself in a couple of days. A new model had burst through red and throbbing, but now that too had dropped off and a third one was blooming ...

As we walked on I didn’t see much of the view, most of my attention being taken by large pieces of skin peeling from my nose, and I passed more than a mile cross-eyed, trying to pull bits off.....My nose was glowing red, the new skin burnt before the old skin had shed.
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We now have the comments from members of the family that Sally and Tim were staying with, to go with all of this:

Anne says she does remember the couple taking some hiking trips while they were staying with her.
Another of Winn’s relatives said: “ The inference that they did the walk in one go, because they were homeless and living in tents, is rubbish. They weren’t homeless and they weren’t forced into these things. They did walking holidays like most people do.”
Anne says that she twice tried to get in touch with Winn’s publisher, Penguin, about the inaccuracies in the memoir but wasn’t taken seriously. Penguin has previously said that no one raised any concerns about the book.

Are there not more than 3 photos outside of the Minehead to LE section? Chesil Beach, SWCP sign at Poole, Moth walking away in tree tunnel etc?

I hate to harp back on the CB Prize thing again (but I'm going to because I still have ire that needs expressing) - EVEN IF, giving Sal a HUGE helping of 'benefit of the doubt' she gave us 'her truth' (factually, they considered themselves homeless, she really did believe that Tim had CBD) and leaving aside the history of theft and money-mismanagement...

She still entered the First Book Prize Award (or allowed her publishers to enter her book) despite knowing that she had already written and published a book. She knew. She can't pretend that she published it in her sleep, can she? Did she consider that 'First Book Award' meant 'only enter the first book that sells a lot and that people might have heard of'. It means, your first published book.

Yes there are 9 photos of the South Haven Point to West Bay section and 22 photos of the Minehead to LE section. So we have 31 photos of those 2 sections which ( if you take out the section around Barnstaple, Newquay to St Ives and Isle of Portland sections) equals 190 miles + 60 miles.

'ITV The Masked Singer's Moth breaks down in tears as fans 'work out' true identity': It's Tim Walker. We could have told you that 7 months ago!

Yes, we have sometimes touched on the topic of potential plagiarism and @BrandyAndLovage offers us some more persuasive examples of that above. I'm also always drawn back to comments I mentioned before, back in the mists of thread time, made by Timmoth, I think in the on camera podcast with Sophie Raworth? I haven't got time to dig it out now if anyone has? Something about them discussing books and picking apart bits of them?

Yes, I agree. Sometimes though it's also down to just pure, simple, jealousy.

Was Salray (or both of them) visited by the green-eyed monster, for example when Timmoth's brother and SIL bought property in France? Did they have to have one too? If Timmoth's parents had lent or given money to Timmoth's brother as we are told they had, did Salray (or both of them) feel jealous of that and want some of her PILs' money too so she took it? Was the loan to the same brother and was it used towards his French property purchase? Did our Pinocchio pair use the money to buy their own 'French Chateau'? Hopefully a charabancer will come along to tell us whether or not the timelines fit for this.

According to a French news article, Tim's brother bought his French chateau in 2006 and the family moved to live in it and restore it 2008. So it's plausible they gave money to help with the renovation.

It's not clear precisely when Sal stole the £25,000 but it was after the Hemmings theft and Cooper bail out loan in 2008. Given their predicament I think it likely the £25,000 was taken not long after, suggesting early 2009. So it is conceivable Sal stole in response to the in-laws giving/loaning a large sum to Tim's brother.

I remember, in the French Quarter podcast, Cecille explaining to Chloe that all her family were crammed into a phone box. A relative in England had said that Sally was missing and that her grandparents had hardly anything in their account. So Sal must have robbed her in-laws when still stealing from the Hemmings. From 12 mins:

The French Quarter | The Walkers Ep5 | The Observer

Ah

I know we've talked a lot about Moth's impressive agility for a man who has been suffering with CBD for nearly 20 years, but this photo takes the biscuit imo.

I suspect that it was taken during the LL walk from Cape Wrath to Polruan.

Photos of Moth on the LL walk on Offa's Dyke and in Devon with same hat, money belt and camo trousers as featured in the 'jumping for joy' photo!.

@ThompsonTwin I'm constantly baffled (although not really...) by the absence of walking poles or other walking aids in Moth's pictures. This man is dragging a leg! He regularly needs help getting out of bed!

Perhaps he didn't like visible markers of his frailty appearing in photographs so hid his mobility aids away behind the lens.

(The sarcasm in this post was sponsored by the entire Salt Path catastrophe).

There is one photo taken on the LL walk which does show Moth with a walking pole. This suggests that all other shots may have been cleverly edited....

Sal's IG feed suggests the photo of Moth airborne was taken on Offa's Dyke during the LL walk. Same cloud formations in both shots.

Thank you. Perhaps they did edit out all his walking poles etc, but surely if Sal wants us to believe that Tim had such extreme difficulties with movement, it would have been more sensible and believable to leave them in? Besides, most distance walkers use walking poles, even those with no disability whatsoever, did he never need anything more sturdy?

And it's nice to see him so apparently mobile and flexible that he can sit on a rock with his knees well bent as well as jumping, planking and all the other varieties of movement he is photographed being capable of. Truly, it is a miracle!

I simply don’t believe that Tim is ill at all.

Thanks for the jumping pic and notes thereon @ThompsonTwin

I say thanks 😂although they provoke a serious desire in me to jump up and down on the spot in fury. I would posit that TiMoth was actually a great deal fitter than many men well into their 50s, even those without a terminal, degenerative neurological condition. My gym bunny, fitness and sport mad brother would have been hard pressed to do half of what T is documented as doing when he was the same age (a few years ago) and there's nothing wrong with him (apart from the hip replacement he needed in his 40s due to decades of distance road running but that's another story)