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 think she’s trying to shout out that her method of curing Moth worked. In the backs of her books she writes of mistrusting the “careful on the stairs” advice for example. I’ll have to find the excerpts and post them shortly, but that is what I believe these pictures are for. It’s sticking two fingers up at Death and the doctor…. Even though neither have given that diagnosis or tapped on the door with bony fingers yet.

I thought the same as you - about all of this. I don't think we have tried to be unfair on these threads and that is why I eventually joined in. I have always considered that we are reviewing the output of this brand and do think it is legitimate to analyse all of that.

Strangely, I discovered that Peter Knight - the lynchpin of Gigspanner - was to Sal what Jason Isaacs was to Tim. I shared a video of him, with Sal next to him, saying that they were all a family and he saw her as another musician. I could not believe that the musician that had performed alongside Maddy Prior could entertain any idea of Sal as a performer.

Unlike many of the victims of the Walkers these artists can successfully move on. Gigspanner have already won an award for their album that they featured instead of the Sal show. Their current news is: Added to the 'end of year honours' mentioned in our previous posts, it has been a creatively exciting and fulfilling 2025 for the Band. For us, the key to pushing ourselves creatively and keeping ourselves energised, is not to look back, but to fix on new ideas, new material, new ventures. With those goals in mind, we are looking forward to what 2026 might deliver.

The actors Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs are also set to star in another film together. The US film The Julia Set had shots taken in London in October 2025 - Gillian is also one of the producers.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s even that. For me, even if I’d known nothing about the books or the scamming and grifting, she’d just be an embarrassingly terrible performer. Watching her gives me the same violent cringe as watching the parish priest in my childhood parish sing solo really badly on the altar during Mass, apparently unaware he was way off key and wobbly.

But it’s more puzzling as to what a bunch of experienced musicians saw her as adding to their performances.

I did read one very irritating review which seemed to see SW as adding authority to the gigs, describing SW’s spoken interludes as ‘commenting on the oral tradition while adding to it’, and reciting a list of flower names before a song (which she’d have had to look up, as there seems no evidence at all she’s knowledgeable about plants) and introducing a folk song about the demise of Cornish fishing with some hocum about unemployed youths meeting in the food bank queue.

I mean, it’s embarrassing that she’s seen as having some authority to speak about Cornwall, Devon etc. She was a tourist who went there on a couple of walking holidays, and only continued to live in Cornwall because her husband was studying locally. If he’d got a place elsewhere, they’d have been living in Norfolk, York, London etc.

Yes, again and particularly your thoughts on this:

I mean, it’s embarrassing that she’s seen as having some authority to speak about Cornwall, Devon etc. She was a tourist who went there on a couple of walking holidays, and only continued to live in Cornwall because her husband was studying locally.

Thank you for acknowledging this - can you imagine how we feel ..💖

What has been shared previously is this performance by Cornish artists - Salt Road. @ThompsonTwin has even informed us that Sally Walker was in their audience at one gig.

Anna has travelled the length and breadth of Cornwall collecting stories that have since become wildly exaggerated in a collection of poetry and prose. Formed originally to provide traditional processional music to accompany the famous Tom Bawcocks lantern procession in Mousehole. Bagas Degol means simply ‘feast day band’

September 2016 Newsletter.pdf

Such interesting posts from everyone, I find the Gigspanner performances make me cringe, Peter Knight was looking for another author to collaborate with, as to whether his wife really read the book and thought Raynor would make a good collaboration, I don't know. I think it could have been driven by seeing the success and popularity of TSP, Raynor had a huge following that she would bring, along with plenty of publicity, all good for the band at the time.

So many people have profited out of this deception, none of them want to acknowledge it, they just want everything to be quietly forgotten. The agent and publisher, just want us to pretend nothing has happened, nothing to see. The consultant, who was prepared to talk to Chloe but not be named (even though we know who he is) said he had never come across anyone, who has reversed the symptoms of CBD or even halted them, this is the consultant responsible for all the medical letters published and the reviewer of TSP. So Tim's consultant is saying he has never come across anyone, that means Tim. The film makers are silent, Gigspanner moving on without mention, the CB prize no action. It doesn't look like anyone is going to do anything, the PSPA charity showed integrity dropping them immediately.

I do find it really odd though that Gigspanner even seriously considered a collaboration with her. Gigspanner were already very successful in their own right - Peter Knight was in Steeleye Span, and his original Gigspanner dated from 2006 and already had a big following in folk circles and well connected, prior to meeting SW. I've seen Gigspanner live a couple of times before their 'Big Band' expansion and they are terrific musicians. I wonder if they thought adding SW to the mix would expand their live audience reach still further - that's the only explanation that seems credible to me. But you'd think there'd have been an audition at which it was immediately obvious that she was a terrible performer...so was there never any audition or did she somehow manage to blag her way through?

It’s the equivalent of stepping in something nasty and trying to scrape it off and forget about it and hope no one notices. None of the artists want to have anything to do with them and they all have different reasons and different levels of involvement but ultimately they don’t want to be smeared by association any more and that means keeping their mouths shut and thoughts to themselves. By moving forward with no reflection on it, they don’t have to be pulled back at any time to comment on any response that may be launched at them from the two grifters desperate to spit venom at them…. Which they have a habit of doing.
The charity released a statement and made themselves clear as they needed to. That must have been like waking up the morning after in one of those Hangover films, not knowing what the heck happened and then being forced to look at hundreds of instant Polaroids.
Penguin remains stoical.

I think taking on a false authority to speak about Cornwall/Devon is part of her ongoing reinvention of personal identity and belonging.

Having written negatively about what she saw as a lonely isolated childhood on the farm at Dunstall, allegedly stolen from her family and her employer, and then as an adult left Burton on Trent and then Wales precipitately behind, she seems to be grasping for a sense of belonging, somewhere that is 'her place'. To repeatedly swiftly shed your life in the way she has done suggests a fragile core identity and an inability to deal with life as it is. I would not be at all surprised if they eventually do a midnight flit from Cornwall for yet another 'fresh start' , because fundamentally her identity appears to be that of someone on the run - including from herself. But wherever she goes, there she'll restlessly be, someone who never really settles. I doubt SW herself knows who she really is.

Yes, I think that's my question. I can understand in theory the idea of adding a well-known name to draw in new audiences, but I can't imagine such seasoned musicians, who'd been gigging in various forms for aeons and knew a lot about how gigs work, just signing her on without clarity about what she was actually going to be saying and doing onstage. Quite apart from anything else, like what she's actually saying, and whether you'd want a total incomer pontificating about your region, she's actually quite difficult to listen to, with her strange little gaspy indrawn breaths before a sentence, and her difficulties with 'r' and 'l'.

I know many of us think it is unfair that she won the Bland prize but I cannot understand how she could have been shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. I do not mean that there are not nice pieces about being outside in her books. It is possible that she writes best about being in the countryside and amongst lambs, etc. She does not seem to understand the differences in the various parts of the country that she is in.

I have heard her saying that she does not read a whole book of nature - just bits from various books. That she never takes a book with her on walks. None of this ever stops her from speaking with authority on nature. I have heard her saying that there are fewer lapwings - this is because she says that they never see lapwings. I do not know about numbers but what I do know is she doesn't see them, even though they are very near her, because in Cornwall we get them in the winter. Sally comes from inland and in the east of the country - she expects to see them in the summer.

It is demonstrably a travesty that she has been looked up to as an authority on nature.

Salray was a bestselling author, being widely feted in some literary circles and appearing frequently across multimedia. Perhaps Gigspanner wanted to jump on that big bandwagon (pun intended) or maybe it was an Emperor's New Clothes situation? Perhaps a combination of the two.

How many of us have been carried along by the popularity of something or someone and then afterwards, in the cold light of day, older, wiser, without the rose-tinted specs, been a little embarrassed by that?

I think you're probably right.

She's cycled through a lot of landscapes, creatively speaking.

She grew up in the Midlands, and depicts herself as attuned to the world of the farm her family held, and that it was a moment of life-altering sadness when her father had that letter she claims was about him not being able to pass on the tenancy to his children (except he doesn't seem to have been the tenant) when she knew she would have to 'leave the land', then when she meets townie TW, suddenly the farm is uninteresting and she's all about his interests, climbing and eco-warriorism and hiking in the Scottish Highlands, and then, it's all about Wales and the Lyn Peninsula and the Gangani and restoring their house with love and bare hands, and then suddenly Wales is unattractive, full of gossip, grim council accommodation and hostile judges and women with tight ponytails and Welsh accents, and it's all about the SWCP as their mystic space of wild headlands and safety etc etc, and then it's the healing rewilding of Haye Farm and TW becoming a kind of Green Man, and then we're back to Scotland and the Pennine Way and Offa's Dyke, with a side order of 'My only home is with my dying beloved'. (The Raynor Winn brand has stayed much more identified with Cornwall, though.)

(And that's leaving out entirely their actual geographical movements and addresses, which don't necessarily correspond at all with their 'memoir' ones.)

But you can easily imagine them moving on to the French property, or to an entirely different French property, and lovingly restoring an old bastide with their bare hands and TW's knowhow, and seeing whether the A Year in Provence brand might be reviveable.

I think you are right @DisappointedReader, we are looking at this with hindsight, when I looked into this a bit more, Peter Knight had been looking for an author to collaborate with, since he worked with Terry Pratchett. Also, do you think if Raynor fancied Peter, she might have been very flattering to him, he might have enjoyed that. I haven't expected any response from Gigspanner other than the information they put out, their gigs going forward.

I could see the next incarnation looking something like this: There will be a remote croft/smallholding in Scotland/Ireland where they 'farm' with two sheep and a chicken. TW whittles small wooden sheep from old pallets which they sell at a roadside honesty box stall. SW learns to spin fleece from her own two sheep and joins Ravelry, perhaps under a username such as 'walk a bit spin a bit'. Soon followed by an inflated photographic feature in Spin Off Magazine, and appointed an ambassador to British Wool. After which there is a book about How I Discovered Traditional Crafts and a Slow Simple Life after Homelessness.

Saltim have certainly been pulling the wool over people's eyes for most of their lifetime @TheBookShelf so that seems to be rather fitting.

As they've already 'done' Wales and Cornwall, perish the thought of them misappropriating all things Scottish or Irish next though. I think I can hear those two fine nations pulling up the drawbridge and fortifying the defences.

I think you overestimate their farming capabilities! More like one sheep and two hens, I'd say!

Perhaps they'll just farm a dead parrot next time? There is something Monty Pythonesque about aspects of their farce.

They could go to NZ, take up sheep farming, and write The Dags Journal.

What have the poor Kiwis done to deserve them?!

What makes you think the consultant Chloe spoke to is Tims consultant ?

In episode 4 The Miracle, towards the end, Chloe tells us that she has tracked down the neurologist who's name is blacked out in the letters published by Raynor Winn, she says that he is from Pwellheli, she speculates as to whether he knew Tim and Sally, or not before meeting them in his clinic. He agrees to speak to Chloe in general terms, acknowledging that he's not a specialist in CBD.

Oh, that made me snort. Perhaps Moth is 'pining for the fjords' or is not quite an 'ex-parrot'.

There's definitely a blackly comic Moth as Dead Parrot Sketch waiting to be written. SW erupts into A and E with an obviously-pretending TW inert on a trolley, saying 'I'm dying!' while some bored medic keeps saying 'Well he looks fine to me' and 'Does he have a pulse?'

I find it intolerable too and I've forced myself to watch what bits there are in the interests of fairness.

I like folk, no expert, but have seen enough people (like the great June Tabor) live and watched many others on film (I particularly like Eliza Carthy) and I honestly don't think she adds anything, unless menacing whispering, shuffling and the Dr StrangeRay lab coat is your idea of talent. It isn't mine.

Emperor's new clothes, the whole thing.

Sally invents Raynor and then has to be her.

Excellent point @HatStickBoots . I'd add that I think she has come to believe her own publicity and may actually think that she is an injured innocent. Never wise for people to delude themselves so.

I don't think when Cary Grant apparently said "Archie Leach is dead. I killed him" he had any intention to deceive, but he certainly had complexities around the dissonance between Archie and Cary (and his frankly horrible childhood, which gives him more of a pass than Salray)