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 think ANYONE does. If he is ill, it most certainly is not a neurodegenerative illness. Although, he's in his sixties, so it wouldn't be at all surprising if he has something wrong, but it's unlikely to be anything that thousands of other men of his age don't have too.

Imagine seeing that photo of Moth, jumping for joy on Offa's Dyke in 2021 some 16 years after claiming to have noticed the first symptoms of CBD if you were a genuine patient with CBD with an average life expectancy of 9 -12 years.

How would you feel when you realised your terminal neurological condition had been cynically exploited for commercial gain by somebody who appears to be as fit as a flea?

There are grifters and there are grifters. This topic has run to 25 threads partly due to the mind boggling levels of deceit and emotional manipulation undertaken by Sal and Tim.

What continues to amaze and disgust me is that Sal and Tim seem happy to emotionally manipulate the most vulnerable people they encounter (BC via his wife suffering from breast cancer/ economicaly pressured small businessmen such as Martin Hemmings as well as those genuine sufferers of CBD) yet portray themselves as innocent victims of circumstance and believe they are entitled to pontificate on issues of our time (CBD/homelessness/the environment/social injustice etc etc).

Sal and Tim have exploited the most vulnerable in society for their own commercial success. Imo, that places them beyond contempt.

Yep. Even if the indolent atypical version was a line of defence, there is no sign of ANY decline. I can't believe i didn't question his illness when I finished reading the book and learned he was still going strong. I think I simply put trust in Penguin the publishing industry and couldn't fathom someone lying about a terminal disease, so it never crossed my mind to think "hang on a minute," even though i felt something was off about the story.

I once read a thread on Netmums about an obvious scam where men were going round houses claiming to be selling tat as part of a scheme to get ex-prisoners back into work. One poster said people should give these men a chance and buy some stuff from them, or else they might think how unfair it is that other people are living in nice neighbourhoods and burgle them. Some people really do think like that.

I remember when I heard about TSP and my friend was trying her hardest to get me to read the book (this will have been a couple of years after it came out). I heard that Tim was still alive and at that point I thought 'well, how terminal is this illness then?' When I heard there was a sequel I raised my eyebrows even higher, because 'homeless and terminal' is quite a long way from 'series of books'...

I remember being surprised back in 2018, or whenever it was that I read TSP, that Timoth had managed so well. But I didn't give it much more thought because, to be frank, I wasn't that invested in their story.

I also hadn't seen the IG account so hadn't seen the photos of Timoth planking, leaping etc.

If it hadn't been for this scandal, I suspect I would probably have seen that the film was out, remembered that he had been (allegedly) terminally ill, and googled to see when he'd died.

And I'm a retired medic. I should have noticed more! But as I said, I wasn't a fan of the books. I wasn't following their doings on IG. I just assumed that he was ill, had done temporarily very well (because many people do defy odds, even if only temporarily), and would by now be deceased.

I do rather wonder what Sal and Tim are going to do with themselves for the next 2 years until OWH comes out. They haven't been seen in public since July 2025. Are they cooking up a new scheme and, if so, what?

You can only reread Beowulf and binge watch The Salt Path so many times!

So many discrepancies in Sal's account of how TSP came to be published. In the article in Big Issue below (16 Dec 2020) she claims that she wrote it all at the kitchen table in the flat in Polruan, then finished it and then sent an email to The Big Issue in May 2017 which then published an article on homelessness in July 2017.

On the days when I couldn’t be on the cliff tops I opened the guidebook we’d used as we walked the South West Coast Path, traced my hand across the OS map inside, read Moth’s pencilled notes in the margins and began to write. I wrote us back on to the path. I might have been in the kitchen for months, but in my mind I was out on the headlands in the wild weather, flying with the gulls. Then suddenly, almost unbelievably, it was complete. I’d written The Salt Path.
By the time I’d reached the last sentence I knew that the decision to walk hadn’t been completely spontaneous. In that painful, traumatic moment we’d been running, almost instinctively, to the one sure thing left in our lives, our connection to the natural world and the safety that offered us. I wanted to share the sense of hope and possibility we’d found on the path, although the likelihood of someone in their 50s with no writing experience finding a publisher seemed slim. But I had a lot to say about homelessness, so offered an article to The Big Issue. Their thoughtful, insightful features editor Steven MacKenzie picked it up, printed it, and our world changed.

However, in an article in Dorset Life in May 2025 , Sal claims she presented it to Moth on his 57th birthday in July 2017.Clearly the two accounts are completely contradictory! In other interviews she claims that she presented Moth with a 40 page manuscript on his birthday and subsequently expended it into TSP. Clearly the accounts are completely contradictory

When Raynor Winn wrote the original draft of what became the international best-seller, The Salt Path it was simply as a gift for her husband, Moth. Presenting it to him on his 57th birthday, she hoped that helping him remember their epic journey would be good for his health. (He was diagnosed with Corticobasal Degeneration - CBD - a neurodegenerative brain condition, just before they began walking.)

I've previously said here this doesn't stack up for this very reason. She claimed she began writing in autumn 2016 meaning any birthday gift for Moth had to be in July 2017 and the moment Alice suggested she should find an agent and publish it. Yet she had already written the LSB manuscript and she had already approached and failed to find an agent when she emailed the Big Issue in May 2017, which undermines the birthday and Alice's idea story two months later. Sal gets an E- for timeline fudging.

Yes thanks to the above posters for the info on the publication and dates. I think LSB is the melting Mars bar. It is why the people who know a lot have said nothing or just reiterated 'due diligence'.

LSB sent a huge signal - this author was prepared to write a deeply personal memoir and distort the truth. She relished writing in depth about how everything was the fault of 'Cooper'. This author had changed her mother's death date in order to 'big up' her dread of her husband's death within the next two years.

Anyone who is anyone knows that 'unflinchingly honest' is a more acceptable slogan for 'unflinchingly ruthless'.

Well, she’s endlessly contradicted herself throughout, hasn’t she?

Her SM depicts a capering, leaping, planking husband while her books depict an adorably monetisable leg-dragging, trembling, exhausted, forgetful, dying one.

Her books and press presence present them as (1) a farmer and mystic of the coastal wilds and (2) a wild-nature-attuned ecowarrior who believes mountains call to him, whereas the evidence suggests they are in fact ill-prepared holiday campers and hobby farmers, with more interest in buying flash cars and French property than in the natural world. certainly no evidence of any eco credentials, interest in preserving habitat or biodiversity, climate change etc.

SW likes to think of herself as a sort of shy woodland creature forced unwillingly to ‘do PR’ for a book she only wrote as an aide-memoire for a dying spouse, but for a shy woodland creature, she doesn’t half put herself out there in the media, not to mention her side hustle as a whispery shuffle-dancing voiceover for Gigspanner. And of course the ‘I only thought my daughter meant to put it in a ring binder’ thing is nonsense. She wrote it to sell, every bit as much as HNTDDD.

Plus the adorableness is contradicted even within TSP, by the strand of ill-concealed misanthropy and entitlement.

Every book reveals something the author didn’t intend to say. I can see evidence of a novelist friend’s anxiety in all her books. What is evident in all of SW’s writings is the (1) presumption of their own underdog status, even when she’s depicting two rich people taking a four-month holiday in LL and has to work terribly hard to not let this be too obvious, (2) that other people just do not understand their pain, and (3) an entrenched distrust and dislike of others, particularly women she considers powerful.

I think this should be printed out a million times and stuck in the front of every single copy of TSP, LL, TWS and (if it ever eventually materialises) OWH.

I agree! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
There is so much to print out, laminate and stick into a binder that I believe every book shop should have an arrow underneath her books pointing to an extra room which contains all the discrepancies for said author’s works. This reading room will be stacked floor to ceiling. Moth and Raynor, Sally and Tim are yin and yang. People only have to realise that the words and pictures don’t match and once that happens you can’t “unsee” it. BC (before Chloe) we see the dapper Moth with his favourite book and think “Oh bless, he hadn’t got long left. It’s nice to see her spoil him with his new clothes and comfortable life. They earned it.” AC (after Chloe) it’s “What a smug tosser with a brand new copy of Beowulf, mature male model pose, advertising whatever brand that it and Sally fawning and gushing behind the lens.” Fake Moth is just Foth (fake Paul McCartney was Faul).

@SableGules
“whispery, shuffle dancing voiceover”

😅

(Unrelated, but I wish I could edit my previous post for a grammatical error caused by auto correct which changed a verb to the wrong tense. I only saw it when it was too late.)

I’m being unfair, as it’s obviously nothing to do with the fake CBD or thefts, or the tissue of self-serving fictions that are SW’s oeuvre, but I find the videos of her onstage with Gigspanner almost unbearable to watch.

There’s something of the ‘unusually bad karaoke session’ about it, with a bit of ‘particularly low point at a poetry open mike’ added in, the bit where everyone goes to the bar or loo or out for a smoke…

I do always find myself wondering what Gigspanner thought they were doing, even before the Observer story. I know someone’s wife loved TSP, but I just can’t see what they thought she was bringing. Yes, potentially expanding their audiences, but surely such experienced musicians can’t have thought her whispery stylings were actually adding to their gigs in a good way..?

@HatStickBoots - the problem is always going to be those that don't care. Those that want to read pretty books about nice middle class people (like themselves) going on a 'bit of an adventure'. Not too taxing a read, plenty of 'observations on wildlife/scenery' so they can imagine they also have been there. They aren't interested in how fake it all might be, how invented, how screwed up the backstory is.

They want pretty mountains, a bit of angsty monologue (to convince themselves they've read a Book of Worth) and a cute ending.

Yes, like that very revealing messenger-shooting comment on a Cornish FB page someone linked, where a poster said, after someone had posted the Observer story, ‘How sad that anything nice has to be destroyed’, with the implication that CH and team were more at fault for destroying the ‘something nice’ than SW was for lying and stealing.

People react to being conned in different ways. Some people might now feel embarrassed that they were taken in the TSP. Minimising what SW did or refusing to accept the criminality of some of her actions is a way of side-stepping that.

I think it would be interesting to see a Venn diagram, those charts with overlapping circles, to show who bought the books, gave them as gifts, read for a book club, went to a literary festival to hear Raynor, went to the film. I have a strong feeling that the Raynor Winn Brand has been driven by this particular group of people. Others have partaken of some of it but I think the main fans would show a lot of overlap!

https://yougov.co.uk/entertainment/articles/51730-40-of-britons-havent-read-a-single-book-in-the-last-12-months

Some stats on reading here. SW’s readership will swing to middle-aged and older, primarily middle-class, women. Older women make up by far the greatest audience share at most book events, literary festivals etc.

Older women make up by far the greatest audience share at most book events, literary festivals etc.

They do, but it's not entirely because they are the ones who read more. Book events and festivals tend not to have facilities for small children - and who wants to sit through an author talk with a toddler yelling on their lap - which rules out mothers who don't have convenient childcare. Lots of book festivals are held in lovely picturesque places which you have to travel to get to, ruling out anyone who doesn't have spare time (or who works weekends) and transport. So much of the audience tends to be built of people who can just decide to go to these things and not have to worry about ticket prices, childcare or how to get there.

There is a lot of movement in the writing fraternity at the moment about making writing as an occupation less 'middle class'. But as a working class woman I can say they don't make it easy, by requiring travel and spare time and disposable income for anything from doing book signings to writing conferences and agency meetings.

Oh, agreed. They give a somewhat skewed idea of who someone’s actual readership is. The last time I sat in on one of my my novelist friend’s events at a literary festival, the entire audience, bar a single middle-aged man and me, was white, middle-class women of sixty and over. But emails from readers tell a different and more varied story.

Thank you for this, you’re right. In my thirties I was always unable to join some older friends who’d go to the Oxford literary festival or any science based festival in or around London, simply because they were held during a working week and I had two very young, school aged children and a part time job whilst my friends had neither. I loved hearing about it all afterwards but never made the effort to go with them even for one day as it all seemed too much to organise. I’d forgotten about this.

Sal posted this photo of Moth 'jumping for joy' on 21 May 2025. It was taken on Offa's Dyke Path during the LL walk in Aug/Sept 2021, some 16 years after Moth is supposed to have experienced the first symptoms of CBD.

What does posting this image on her IG feed tell us about Sal? Is she stupid, careless,brazen or something else?

Well I don’t think you’re being unfair. I think you’ve just unconsciously picked up on the fact that she’s a fake. The character she portrays in her books led to the wife of one of the musicians desiring her to collaborate with them. It’s a weird thing, Sally invents Raynor and then has to be her. What a mishmash! It can only be a disaster. Sally isn’t embroiled in folklore. Honestly though, I still don’t know who she is. I think that is why Chloe still very much wants to talk with her and wants to read OWH.