Thread 26 : 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 25 IS FULL

Please see the OP of Thread 25 for all the links to The Observer's reporting and podcast series, our threads one to 24 and so on.

After 25,000 posts there are still new things to discuss:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
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.

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 excellent podcast series The Walkers (link in Thread 25) 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, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Remember, even Hollywood rabbits attract the odd flea: please do not engage with drive-by scolders 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 over 8 months we have done amazingly well together for 25 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.

As ever, as we embark on our 26th thread riding the community charabanc, keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider.

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 25 IS FULL: www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5485730-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?

Jason Isaacs helped the film crew lug their camera equipment about. Maybe JI was staying in character - it seems the sort of thing that "Moth" might do.

https://rts.org.uk/article/even-listers-need-muck-inside-location-management

That's interesting, thank you. Apart from the 1-in-4 incline to the beach at Clovelly, my abiding memory is of the seagull's racket - they seemed louder there! In the film I seem to recall the walkers/Walkers reaching Padstow first, followed by the Clovelly shots - so out of sequence. Also discovered, after our cinema visit, that filming the Culbone church scene (where GA as RW mentions the "former leper colony") was ruled out as too challenging. A churchyard in Cornwall was substituted.
Just noticed the white dressing on JI's right leg. Was he "in character" or was this a genuine injury as a result of his assistance with transporting the equipment? Or perhaps an aide-memoire to remind him of which leg to portray the limp!

@UpfromSomerset "Or perhaps an aide-memoire to remind him of which leg to portray the limp!" Like Leigh Francis (ostensibly) using his hand bandage to remind him to stay in "Keith Lemon" character? ("Here we have a cottage in Wales. Oo would live in an 'ouse like this?")

Blake Morrison was just on R4 talking about his forthcoming book on writing memoirs. He briefly mentioned TSP. It seems to have entered the lexicon as a shorthand for untruthfulness in memoir writing. BM seems to be doing a lot of promotion work for his new book so will be keeping the flame alight.

Thanks @SaltyTea that is interesting to hear the interviewer and Blake Morrison bring in the relevance of TSP. From 2hrs 55mins:

Today - 07/04/2026 - BBC Sounds

I think this will interest readers of this thread. Apologies if someone has already recommended it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m001w207

It always struck me as a difficult thing to adapt, anyway, even had every word been true. I could see why a filmmaker might want to adapt a bestseller purely because it has a built-in audience already interested, but TSP doesn’t really have any characters, any plot, any recurring minor characters, any usable dialogue etc, plus it has the huge challenge that a walk along a very specific coastal path is key, but very difficult to get a film crew to much of. And if you have accessible places playing other places, or get stretches of path in the wrong order, you lose local-minded viewers, hikers etc.

Over on Facebook I just picked up a thread on 'Lost in a Good Book' where someone posted TWS and asked for opinions on it as she found herself 'skimming it'.

I was encouraged that all comments bar one referenced the negative stories around Sal and TSP and most said they would never read anything by her again. Everyone seemed angry at being duped. There was only one comment (by the original poster) who said that she hadn't heard anything about the scandal and 'must have missed the hype'.

Words like 'whiny' and 'fraud' were used quite a lot.

Good to see OC's podcast getting a shout out in Oz.

Best podcasts to listen to this Easter long weekend, from Expanse: The Nannup Four to Empire City - ABC News

I think TWS must seem a deeply weird book if you hadn’t read TSP and bought into the ‘What happened next to this adorably relatable, down on their luck couple?’ and ‘Did poor, sweet, charismatic Moth relapse and die?’

If you hadn’t, you’d just encounter some tea-obsessed moany misanthrope who didn’t like being homeless and now doesn’t like living under a roof (and oh, the horror of living in a village!), who finds endless excuses for not getting a job, who details her husband’s physical and mental deterioration but seems unworried by him driving long distances solo each day and putting other road users at risk, who looks askance at any benefactor, whether it’s BC or her agent and editor, and manages to glumwash all happy occasions like publishing a bestseller, being offered a farm tenancy by a fan etc etc. Even a straightforward thing like going on holiday to Iceland is reinvented as some kind of endurance ‘test’ that will shock Moth’s system back to health.

Absolutely perfect synopsis!! 👏🩷

The imagery of Moth @NervesofSteel
Even a straightforward thing like going on holiday to Iceland is reinvented as some kind of endurance ‘test’ that will shock Moth’s system back to health.
🙏🏻😅🥹

She was desperately trying to make his continued good health commercially viable for them both and in doing so, manages to rival Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’. Having his system shocked back to health explains the vertical hairstyle and ability to plank, not to mention the roving hands!

This is why I suspect that OWH was going to be her last non-fiction book. She signed up to write more books than she was capable of, she'd strung the 'Moth is ill, walking helps him' story out as far as she could. They were no longer homeless and the book sales mean that she couldn't play on the 'we're poor, us' any more.

In fact, as now part of the 'rich author' set she was going to be ripe for the backlash that tends to hit anyone who makes it big - tall poppy syndrome. So this was coming, it just took an unsuspected form.

Their trip to Iceland has been a regular source of puzzlement to me on this thread. The main reason is that their two holidays to Iceland, 2017 and 2019, have been fused to gain the maximum traction for the emotional pull of the whole story.

I have seen that TWS has been marketed as a medical miracle story so it had to have the need for the walking holiday to heal Moth again. I have seen reviews where readers really bought in to TSP but did not take to TWS - someone said that the best part was that featuring Dave and Julie. However, D & J must have read the book and would have known how contrived and manipulated it was as a true story featuring a man with a terminal diagnosis.

My understanding is that the sign of the desperate need for them to go on this holiday was Moth struggling to read his studies for his degree course work. According to the unflinchingly honest TSP he would have started the 3-year course in 2014 and finished 2017. Even though we know it was, in fact, a year later - it is still not true that the need that was screaming at them was his inability to read his course work.

These facts would be very apparent to family, friends, agents and, I would have thought, devoted fans/IG followers?

Thanks for making me laugh 😂
I really think he is quite the creep!

In TWS it seems that our ‘poor, sweet, charismatic Moth’ (thank you @NervesofSteel for that 🤣 ) doesn’t want Dave and Julie to know how “bad” he is. What an admirable quality, the reader is force fed. The holiday to Iceland takes place in part four of TWS and is called “To a Beginning, in the End” and is also graced with a quote from Simon Armitage’s poem ‘so the peloton passed’ … which he would have had to give his permission for 😖
It begins with a phone call to Dave and Julie and an invite for them to walk together. Dave suggests Iceland.
By the second page the reader starts getting clobbered with the old sympathy baseball bat. As if we could ever forget Moth’s pain, it is reiterated.
”For weeks Moth had known he needed to do this. He was beginning to understand the needs of this new body, the one that didn’t always respond to his instruction, that tired without effort and agitated his thoughts. He was learning to sidestep it, to move when it told him to lie down, to shout when it said be quiet and give in. He willingly rewaxed his boots and bought the same model of Vango tent that we had used on the south west coast path, knowing that our old tent with its duct-taped poles wouldn’t survive the subarctic winds of Iceland. But this trip couldn’t have been more different from our Coast Path walk if we’d designed it to be so. The Salt Path had unexpectedly sold quite a few copies and we could afford to walk into the airport hotel at midnight and check into a room, rather than put the tent up in torrential rain on some scrub grass under the flight path of the planes.”
Raynor Winn, The Wild Silence.

On it goes with descriptions of the old rucksacks propped up together and patches sewn on to cover the burst seams. Food that she never thought they’d eat again is contained inside them. Moth declares that he now has doubts that he can do it and Ray reassures him that it doesn’t matter how long it takes them. She assumes that ‘man-mountain’ Dave can carry Moth’s pack if need be. She references Paddy Dillon’s Walking and trekking in Iceland as the ‘friend in our pocket’.
Some visual comparisons to evoke sympathy:
Dave ‘large’ and ‘loud’
‘As he enveloped Moth in his bear-like grasp there was a shocking change to the view I’d had of the two men hugging goodbye in West Bay on the Coast Path. The weight that Moth had lost became not just something that I could feel, but a large loss made visible by the mirror of our unchanged friend. Suddenly I could see him as Dave and Julie must too. Was his deterioration so gradual that I was taking it for granted? Forcing him into more and more physical challenges that he was fighting to achieve just for me, battling on because I couldn’t accept that one day he would have to give in to CBD, to give himself over to the wind and the dust?’
Raynor Winn, The Wild Silence.

The photos of Moth from these trips do not match the image in the books of an emaciated and deteriorating man.

Thanks @HatStickBoots - it would have been easier for them to have a bracing walk up Brown Willy! To everyone else : I am not being facetious, it is the highest point in Cornwall and Sal has named it as one of her favourite places (oh, yeah).

Hands up, I have not read TWS either. I listen carefully to you all though 😉and I remember that in no time, in Iceland, Sal is again deferring to Tim's athletic prowess in fording streams with alacrity. Also, this is saying it is in the summer of 2019 when, whether you believe TSP or not, he finished his course in 2017 (TSP) or 2018. Lying in print to say he was struggling with reading on the Horticultural degree.

No, and he and 'Dave' look about the same size in all the photos we have of 'Dave and Julie' alongside the Walkers. Certainly Dave isn't the giant 'man-mountain' she represents him as, unless the supposedly fragile and emaciated TW is himself a fair-sized, well-fleshed Alp.

@MulberryBrandy, it's less Moth's memory or inability to read his student notes -- that's the earlier Heartbreaking Development that supposedly means he can no longer remember key bits of the SWCP (hardly surprisingly, as they didn't really walk it) which prompts her to start writing TSP as an aide-memoire.

In the timeline of TWS, fictional though it is, he's finished his degree more than a year earlier, the Big Issue piece has come out, TSP has been published and been a huge success, BC has been in touch, they've moved to Haye Farm and miraculously brought it back to life (and have a conversation about the costs of stocking a farm and what they did on Moth's 40th in which he demonstrates apparent total recall), and Moth says he doesn't want to run Haye Farm not because he's totally workshy or dying, but because he wants to go on Raynor's book tours with her.

In fact, weirdly, given the whole might Moth need to be medivacuated from the Icelandic trail, or, even worse 'Will he have to confess incapacity, use walking poles and have Dave carry his rucksack, thereby meaning his fragile masculinity is permanently compromised?', Moth is apparently perfectly well before they leave, and the walk is not some desperate attempt to save his life again, but a deeply ordinary desire to go on holiday with friends...

I'd forgotten what a deeply odd patchwork of a book TWS is.

It's so obviously cobbled together in the spirit of 'I desperately need to write a sequel to capitalise on the success of TSP, but have literally nothing to say because our personae are fictional, Moth's illness is fictional, the walk that supposedly spawned our bestseller is fictional, large parts of our past are fictional, and I can't be too honest about our current circumstances because that would involve saying 'We're successful grifters, newly rich and famous off the back of our own lies!

'So I will construct another largely fictional narrative about the Terrible Problems of Not Being Homeless Any More, how I wrote my bestseller as a way to jog my amnesiac, dying husband's memory, my mother's deathbed, which I am borrowing from a deleted bit of TSP, my Shy Woodland Creature childhood, how terribly hard I find it doing book events, not because I'm lying through my teeth, but because I am a Shy Woodland Creature, some purple prose about nature, and a holiday. Stick them together and that's a book -- right?'

Oh, too late to add to previous post -- was just skimming through TWS and thinking how odd it is.

I don't ever remember us discussing on here the other 'friends' in TWS, Simon, Gill and Sarah and the people SW meets in Fowey/Polruan. In a way there's far more conversation with them than there is with the useful Dave and Julie, though they're equally under-characterised and mostly used to show how terrible it is for poor shy, traumatised Raynor to be around people who aren't homeless and marginal:

These people could have been any of the people I’d met on the coastal path, any one of them could have been the person that drew in their dog on a retractable lead when I told them I was homeless, or poked me with their foot and called me a tramp when I’d dropped coins on the ground and knelt to pick them up. Assured, confident middle-aged people, secure in their position in society, the village, their own lives.

Weirdly, SW decides that Gill and Simon are in a relationship based on Gill's facial expression the first time she meets them. She meets some of the women at WI flower-arranging, the rest at a party, Gil lends them a canoe, and they all, Moth included, take a meditation class together. They all show up at Haye Farm to pick the apple harvest, because the Walkers, just back from Iceland, don't seem to have thought about the apple harvest or how they might do it.

Do we think Gill, Simon, Marion, Sarah and co are fictional?

Interesting that there's no mention I can recall of anyone who might be Ruth Saberton in any of the Haye Farm scenes? Or is RS just not useful because she's another nature-minded incomer to Cornwall who writes for a living and is too similar to the SW image? Or can't be turned be turned into a symbol of the people who dragged their dogs and children away from the homeless 'tramps'?

I've never seen anyone mention any of those people before but maybe because they are not 'fully-fleshed' characters (rather like the decimated Moth). In the BBC Wales podcasts there was quite a concentration on establishing who would have met the pair in Polruan. I thought there was rather a lot about establishing that a particular lady, who had her fingers in a lot of pies regarding the WI and every other local organisation, had never seen anything of them.

The only person who gave any detail about meeting them was another lady who fell under Tim's spell and sold him a tourmaline Ganesh.

any one of them could have been the person that drew in their dog on a retractable lead when I told them I was homeless

If almost the entirety of Mumsnet is anything to go by, no doubt the 'person' would have been castigated for NOT drawing in their dog on its retractable lead, because doesn't everyone know that not everyone loves dogs and that their dog should be on a short lead and under close control at all times? I'm sure Sal could have got a paragraph out of how dogs were allowed to sniff them (probably assuming that they were only tramps and therefore deserved a good sniffing).* *

I've been browsing through Blake Morrison's 'On Memoir.' The book is divided into short themed sections and he has devoted one to 'Salt Path.' He focuses more on the fraud than the questions raised about TW's diagnosis. This sums up his position: 'What Winn did, to put it at its mildest, was to tidy up the truth so that she and Moth came across as victims and underdogs. Her apology, after the Observer exposé, for ‘any mistakes I made’ while feeling under ‘pressure’ was feeble; the readers who’d bought into her tale of resilience deserved more.' At least he got a chance to comment before he published but I'm surprised he doesn't take the publishers to task more about the lack of fact-checking around CBD.

In another section, he praises he Jenn Ashworth's The Parallel Path (I've not read this), especially for her honesty and with a slight sting in the tail, says, 'Hers, unlike some, is a path you can trust.'

I was listening to Gillian Anderson interviewed on This Cultural Life and how she fell in love with TSP. It was going through some of her main influences and a strong one is the conceptual performance artist Marina Abramović and GA hopes to engage with performance art in the future.

I remember an early post that likened the whole Raynor Winn scam to performance art and you could see the whole concept of HNTDDD through to the film of TSP as performance art. I think this would be especially true where you get Gillian falling in love, Sophie Raworth crying repeatedly and Jason taking it upon himself, on TV, to describe the con artists as the conned.

I remember Our Chloe describing many of her responses from readers as being like those who have been cheated on by a lover. The Goldsmith lecturer, in the BBC podcasts, was still saying it should be turned into a novel as the story affected him. And, of course, the posts that still say it inspires them - even though there is no substance there to lay a foundation in which to enable them to pursue their dream.

I came across Marina Abramović's most famous work at Tate, Liverpool, and she had invited the audience to do what they wanted to her with an array of props, ranging from a feather to a gun. Some did actually physically hurt her. The situation here does not seem so extreme but the 'artists' in the Raynor Winn scam have hurt people on so many different levels. At least, as quoted above by @SaltyTea 'the readers who’d bought into her tale of resilience deserved more.'
from 34mins:
This Cultural Life - Gillian Anderson - BBC Sounds

You've just reminded me that I haven't yet listened to episode 3, which became available while I was on holiday (I'm outside the UK and can't access BBC Sounds). I can't wait to get to the tourmaline Ganesh, which sounds like some kind of off-colour detective story!

I should be absolutely fascinated to meet TW. You would imagine that his charisma and ability to make people like him would make him the obvious con artist and thief of the two of them, rather than shifty-looking, guarded Sally? Just shows, I suppose...

No, Simon, Gill and co aren't at all fleshed-out (though arguably, neither are the Walkers' Bestest Friends Northern Man-Mountain Dave and Small, Tough Julie?). I think we get hair colour, and that Simon and Gill are in a relationship.

I suppose I'm more wondering what they're doing in TWS at all. Assuming they're fictional, or semi-fictional characters, what job are they doing for SW?

If Dave and Julie's job is to show us that the Walkers are not misanthropes but salt-of-the-earth types who gel with gruff Northerners who backpack, then I suppose Gill and co are just there are interchangeable representatives of Well-Heeled Confident Types so that SW can be her Shy Woodland Creature self, and be all relatable and reluctant to Reveal Their Sad Tale, because, after all, they probably dragged their dogs away and called her a 'tramp'.

I imagine TW as one of those low effort people who scrape along relying on superficial charm. I suppose it is possible that they have asked friends not to speak up but neither seem to have a bank of good friends speaking up on their behalf.