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?

Brilliant word, skulduggery!

skulduggery, n. to have dug oneself into a hole as a consequence of gross misrepresentation of a partner's lifespan.

😇

Very funny alternative definition @MulberryBrandy, and another great word for the charabanc dictionary :)

Given her airy-fairy descriptors, I wonder if she's working up to releasing a poetry book? It does seem to be the last recourse of the disgraced writer - and is almost impossible to critique, as any negative comments can be shrugged off with a 'you just don't understand my VISION!'

Great spot! It makes me wonder, did they go see a performance of something during their "healing" Icelandic bimble? And if so, did they reimagine it as a bunch of amateur students wailing into the wind while messing about with mobile phones, who then afterwards gave them a ride in a van up a volcano?

And she’s got form in having composed her semi-poetic whispery bimblings for the Gigspanner tour.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat and @NervesofSteel … please no! 😫 Just the thought of that is so discomforting! She’s such an inauthentic person. I can’t tolerate her or her outpourings, knowing that they come from a place of pure deceit and vanity. I would have to beg that any such new material is never published.
Some things that these ongoing SM posts do prove are that Moth must be alive, well and still going along with this charade. By her logic, he would be dead without his arduous long distance walking on meagre rations of noodles and fudge. So why aren’t they walking???

Oh, she will doubtless depict him, if she ever goes back into print, as trudging manfully up and down the garden loaded with with a rucksack full of rocks, which will have saved him for imminent death, despite the fact that apparently he tried it during the winter at ‘Polly’s’ and it didn’t work.

Anyway, it will be the haters’ fault that he couldn’t gambol free on long- distance paths, pooing in ditches and planking on trig points, engaging passersby with his stories and recitations from Old English poetry.

Maybe he’ll have moved on from Beowulf to The Seafarer, which (from recollections of my undergraduate days) is all about a battle-weary warrior lamenting the loss of past glories…🙄

😫

@YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree : thank you for teaching me the word "bimble" 😃

The one saving grace is that poetry books sell appallingly badly. So she might write a poetry book, but it's highly unlikely that she will be marketing said book. And it's likely to sink without trace, however much Sal might tell everyone that it will be on the GCSE syllabus within the year (yes, I know this is all hypothetical but it feels like something she would do...)

Maybe it will be spoken word poetry and she will compete in poetry slams, whispering and doing her little shuffle dance in her ‘deranged lab technician’ white coat outfit?😀

“Sink without trace”
I’m seeing imagery of the rucksack of rocks with Moth still attached to it wrestling with Sal on the edge of a cliff.
“You must go!!”
”No I won’t!! You’re flipping mad! Stop this!!”
< scuffling >
”Give it up woman!”
< cries > “No! No I can’t! I won’t!”

Perfect material for filmmaker Mark Jenkin.

I think their agent should put them forward for Celebrity Race Across the World, who wouldn’t enjoy their battle against the odds and reflective musings to camera while looking out over a sunset.

Also I agree The Mother of All Cons on iPlayer did through up some very similar themes of pathological lying, entitlement and medical deception.
Highly recommended just for the outstanding sleuthing and tenacity of the two heroes of the grim story.

Update from the DM

Salt Path author Raynor Winn and her husband Moth made a £10million fortune from her book 'based on a lie'... now their surf bum kids are set to cash in | Daily Mail Online

Thank you @ThompsonTwin , good to 'see' you and what a strange article. I was laughing at this:

But last month she posted a rare photo of a glowering coastal cloudscape with a caption which sceptics might apply equally to parts of her own story: 'The sea shifting colour under a restless sky, never quite the same from one moment to the next.'

Here's the easy read version:

Salt Path author Raynor Winn and her husband Moth made a £10million fortune from her book 'based on a lie'... now their surf bum kids are set to cash in | Daily Mail Online

"When approached at the stunning farmhouse near Gweek, Cornwall, where the family now live, Moth – real name Tim Walker – answered the door looking fit and healthy."

Good to know.

It seems like the press have decided that the children are now involved enough in this whole sorry business to be named.

For some reason, what is cracking me up about that story is that photo of TW in an England football shirt, which I hadn't seen before -- I think it's because it's so 'geezer pensioner down the pub' and so utterly off-message in terms of his usual carefully-curated look.

Also (and here I admit I'm in the realms of total irrelevance to the larger story), why, if you were bookish, an obsessive reader since childhood, who'd always wanted to write, would you name your daughter Alice, if your surname was Walker? It's like calling your baby Toni if her surname is going to be Morrison.

Or am I being mean and it's intended as a tribute?

Interesting to know they're still living in the same house.

I'm not so sure about the DM's estimate of SW's total fortune, though -- all Nilsen will tell you is the sales for a particular title, not what SW will have earned from those sales in total. Nearly £10 million is more than I would have expected. If true, there's certainly no need for her to ever venture back into print, whether it's another 'memoir', fiction or Vogon poetry

Yes. We were all terribly worried about him, because surely, at this stage (unable to leave the house to do long-distance walking etc), you would imagine he was near death? Unless the miracle DAT scan 'held' and betokened a permanent miracle cure that didn't 'wear off', unlike the temporary effects of the SWCP walk, or the Icelandic one...?

I agree @NervesofSteel, the shirt is not Moth's usual style, having nothing to say is very unlike Moth too :)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s considered what they’d do if these were their parents. In my version, I distance myself and announce that my dickish dad is not dying from CBD and my mother is a melodramatic con artist and I want nothing to do with either of them and stuff their money. I “love” how it’s all been neatly arranged and parcelled up to benefit them all. Of course, mother being a bookkeeper would already know how to manage the money. Mother may have earned this money legally but it’s still dirty in my view, having come from exploiting everything, in every direction and the shameful pretence of Father having CBD. Come on! Incidentally don’t their living arrangements make even more of a mockery of the homeless plight here in Cornwall? As I said, anything you can think of that can be exploited, has been.

Good points about the DAT scan results (fake in the real world that we all live in, very real in the alternate Salt Path universe) preemptively deflecting any further questions. “Yes, he was cured and remains so, as I said explicitly in my book.”
The premise for OWH suggests that he was not long for this earth?

<<<<<<< tumbleweed>>>>>>>

I am pleased to know that Moth is still in excellent health because there was I worrying that Sal might be controlling his diet in some manner to either make him very weak or worse. The post mortem would tell the truth though, no amount of money would change that. I imagine she’s already thought that through.
I am still puzzling over the IG feed. Has it always been so ordinary, with never any references to the day to day life of a partner with CBD? It is like the answers she gives on camera about Moth which are so “matter of fact”, so bland…. Not the sort of replies you’d expect when talking about a miraculous recovery from a deadly disease that has no cure and indeed - completely at odds with the pages and pages of spectacular melodrama she has written in her books.

Yes, i finished this last night. A shocking story, a very good piece of storytelling, and interesting to draw some parallels with the Salty Path saga, esp with regards to superfans villianising the truth-seekers and tactics employed by Jean to double down. The two parent sleuths who had both lost children are outstanding humans.

I came on here to share an obervation I just learned but it may well already be in the DM piece above that i need to play catch up on.

Anyway, what i noticed this morning is that back on 10 Dec 2025, just days before the Sky doc airing, Tim, Alice and Tristan were all made shareholders with significant control of Four Hares Ltd..i.e each holding more than 25% of shares. That means Sally has given over all control because she must no longer be a majority shareholder (i.e. less than 25%). Also, Alice was made a company director in April 2026. What any of this means in terms of business strategy i have no idea. Of course, i am not suggesting anything untoward or odd...merely an observation that cogs are turning in the background.

Just read the DM piece - I see i was pipped to the post re: Four Hares intel.

What a piece though...I would not be surprised if SalTim find this one the hardest to swallow of all of them given it is basically about their kids private lives complete with photos. But there is only one (or two) people to blame for that. Tabloids do what tabloids do. Sally failed miserably at her attempts to protect and keep her kids anonymous in the books. Surely she knew her grift risked this kind of attention?