Thread 27 : 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 26 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:
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? | Mumsnet

New posters joining us in the genuine spirit of our civil discourse are always welcome. It would be helpful to get the background from some of Investigative Journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou's excellent exposé items before posting. Chloe's podcast series for The Observer 'The Walkers' covers most things:
The Walkers: The real Salt Path | The Observer
Another suggestion:
BBC Sounds - Secrets of the Salt Path - Available Episodes
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 nearly a year we have done amazingly well together for 26 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.

We are still here after 26,000 posts and fast approaching our one year anniversary together on 6th July 2026, 12 months on from the start of our first thread in response to Our Chloe's somewhat stunning initial exposé. Little did we know what else would come out. Our longevity comes as both a total surprise and a pleasure (mostly!). We've seen charabancers come and go, come back again, delurk and join us for the first time. All are welcome. Threads have both filled up in a day and moved at a more stately pace. Thank you everyone for sharing your time, thoughts, opinions, experience, questions, sleuthing (there's that word!), kindness (there's that other word!) and great humour with me and with each other. As ever, as we embark on our 27th thread riding the community charabanc - this time all holding our brollies and fans aloft for much-needed shade and breeze - keep to the path, no saltiness, eat fudge and drink cider, (but not too much in the current heatwave).

NO POSTS PLEASE UNTIL THREAD 26 IS FULL:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5506717-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?

Is this in the news @ThompsonTwin ? It seems very serious.

How interesting. I suppose from her POV, she’s now associated with a tainted project that’s more scam than story of resilience and love, and she thinks ‘If only you’d waited a year!’ But obviously completely unreasonable to shoot the messenger rather than the liar, grifter and scammer!

Or is this from your mysterious (and compelling) private sources, @ThompsonTwin?

I think those things do stack up @Oeufs so mums(net)'s the word. And thank you to @ShinyBlueTractor , who seems to be new, for prompting us to consider further. And welcome ... you would have been useful when we were considering the Ray at Haye!

Feom the BBC's latest annual report:, section on Wales:

"Welsh language audio saw its largest weekly average accounts on BBC Sounds and our English language offer hit a record 444,000 requests in March 2026, driven by Crime Next Door and Secrets of the Salt Path."

Raynor Winn on the Nature Memoir

Literary Hub » On the Necessary (and Inevitable) Rise of the Nature Memoir: A Reading List

I watched the Simon Armitage documentary about The Odyssey on iPlayer last night. It was very good, a pleasure to watch.
Also I’d like to share some local news for anyone who may be interested: I went to an exhibition at the weekend called ‘Salt, Stone, Air’. It was showcasing four artists who live and work in Cornwall. I thoroughly enjoyed the art and I also bought a book which was part of this celebration too, called ‘salt & stone’. It’s a collection of emotive short stories by Cornish writers. “With the aim of encouraging and supporting writers living in or born in Cornwall by publishing their work, the open call for salt & stone was announced in October 2025. The brief asked for stories that were rooted in the atmosphere of Cornwall and its emotional terrain. We received an overwhelming response from published authors and writers whose stories will be published for the first time.”
The book seeks to capture the contrast of Cornwall: the shifting, fluid nature of life (salt), and the hard, unmoving truths its occupants carry (stone).
I am sure that if not for Chloe’s exposé, Raynor Winn would have loved to have latched onto this somehow.

It's never clear to me that SW has actually read any of these. I mean, not a single one is in any way obscure, they're almost all by famous contemporary nature writers and/or bestsellers from very recently, the kind of thing you'd get if you Googled 'recent books about nature'. And her very brief take on each is something you could glean from the internet/a glance at a back blurb.

I did laugh at this, though: Strangely though, for many years I didn’t find that feeling echoed in nature writing but encountered mainly abstracted observations of nature, viewed through the lens of academic research, or heavily clichéd prose

That is awful that OC was accosted in public by the script writer of TSP, was the TSP film viewed as a one off by the production company or if they film had been a huge success that TWS and LL could have been later adapted? Who knows. The TSP film is now tainted goods and the US market is not promoting it as the 'moving, true story' that it was originally pitched at here in the UK. And the script editor is tainted by association for adapting the work, and probably feels utterly gullible (as do all the readers who read the book and accepted it as true - not realising it was SW's 'our truth' which has no bearing on the real truth.

If the script editor wanted to direct here ire at someone then it should be PRH fore failing to undertake the relevant due diligence prior to publication; the CEO of PRH who prides himself on being a gambler when it comes to trying to find the next big thing to be published. SW's agent hold a share of responsibility in the publication of such a sham. And at the head of the whole procession of guilt is SW, accompanied by TW, SW in her RW pseudonym perverting the reality of what really happened to hide her criminality by portraying them as life's victims, whereas the opposite is true. But then that is not SW and TW's 'our truth'

I find the Literary Hub piece is SW cloaking herself in the respectability of other natural history writers, which then gives her some sort of reflected credibility. Hopefully, the damaged RW brand might mean her works are no longer considered valid works of natural history writing.

Just sneaking back around to the photo of Moth jumping - do you think it was taken as part of a 'photoburst', so like a mini video and they just selected the best shot that showed him at the height of his jump? I can jump like that, especially if I jump off something (is there a rock or something behind him that he could have leaped off?) and if someone videoed me doing it and then chose one shot from the video as a still - it might look like that.

ETA just caught up properly and see that this has been suggested. I shall castigate myself by pouring away my cider and looking forlornly at the empty can.

Glad to see you @Vroomfondleswaistcoat to get this charabanc moving again! I think it’s lovely that you’ve been practicing these Moth-style leaps …. My minds now wandered onto a vision of the equivalent of the Kate Bush Wuthering Heights Day, a Moth Leaps Day with everybody dressed in cravats and shorts and doing jumps on hazardous parts of the SWCP. Simon Armitage can do a cameo.

I do need to jump off something fairly high to produce the result though and the landing isn't always pretty - think tits akimbo. Not a problem that Moth has, of course.

Although I think I may have found my new band name. I'm on base, any volunteers for piano?

I'm smiling at the thought of many jumping Moth's @HatStickBoots, though the danger element in the location would make it an amusing yet terrifying spectacle. You reminded me of the TV comedy, The League of Gentlemen @Vroomfondleswaistcoat, they feature the theatrical act Legz Akimbo, thinking about it Moth would fit right in down Roston Vasey :)

You just need pogo springs attached to your feet @Vroomfondleswaistcoat
😂 Tits Akimbo!

AI still needs to be handled with caution judging from the answer I received from "Rufus" on Amazon UK about Moth's CBD diagnosis!

I wouldn't trust AI to tell me my own name. It is wreaking havoc among the writing industry with Take A Break magazine moving all its fiction to being AI written and putting short story writers out of work. It is also being used to 'write books' which have flooded the market with AI slop and mean that writers' incomes have dropped yet again.

Please, everyone, don't use AI for things that your brain can do.

@Vroomfondleswaistcoat Tits Akimbo - brilliant name for a group. I watched Sally Wainwright's Riot Women at the beginning of the year, and if she reads this is would probably curse herself that she did not come up with that name for her series.

I also agree with your sentiments about AI and literature. In my soon to be ex-workplace and employment sector (it was my 25th anniversary this year) AI is being hailed as the next big thing that has to be used and applied to our everyday work. What I have found over the past 25 years is that staff 20 to 30 years younger than myself do not display any forms of critical thinking and want and expect there to be the one solution to a problem, not that they have to examine a range of options to find a solution. A very, very senior member of staff, where I work, uses AI to draft any personal addresses to staff to impart news relating to organisational change. Then this person reads in the most robotic manner. I'm glad to be calling it a day!

Interestingly, a few years ago, my DW had an ex-colleague who's son was studying a degree in journalism. One of the first assignments the students had to do was undertake a piece of research on a particular topic and summarise their findings. The vast majority of the class resorted to using Google, to retrieve free to access research summaries, which was obvious to the lecturer who had set the assignment. The students received a major scolding for this and were failed in the assigments, and told that if they continued with such lazy shortcuts they would be failed on the course. Tragically from what I see where I work this shortcut mentality is utterly prevalent.

Here is ChatGPT on the subject of Moth's CBD diagnosis. More nuanced. BUT it misses the time lapse between the events described in TSP ( June 2013- Oct 2014) and the initial CBD diagnosis (June 2015). This is where AI falls down and real deductive thinking/journalism adds value

More from ChatGPT on the question of whether Moth was diagnosed with CBD in June/July 2013!

I was looking for resources for a Trinity London course recently. Google’s AI answer suggested students should use particular topics as the basis for their own presentation- which is the exact opposite of what is required (that they must avoid talking about areas too close to the topics for that grade). Luckily I prefer to go to source but if someone were less alert they would be teaching the wrong thing!

So it’s no real surprise that AI is as confused about Moth’s health as most of the readers of The Salt Path!

Posting below a link to an article in today's Observer. The report is outside the journalist's normal line of work and unexpectedly took over her life. It doesn't relate to TSP, and I hope that tenuous parallel with OC's reporting makes it ok to share here.

https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-ethical-hacker-how-a-mislaid-phone-led-to-a-nightmare-of-fake-reviews-and-claims-of-antisemitism

ETA just caught up properly and see that this has been suggested. I shall castigate myself by pouring away my cider and looking forlornly at the empty can.

A little harsh. Now, now @Vroomfondleswaistcoat. Don't be so hard on yourself and it's against our thread T&Cs to waste good cider!

I'm also slightly concerned about all this various jumping by pps on the thread. Steady on! We don't want any unnecessary injuries on the charabanc. I don't want to have to take a crocodile of pps on crutches on a 630 mile walk to miraculously heal any broken bones.

Good afternoon everyone. I hope you are well today and managing to enjoy the summer weather. ☀

Lol to the broken bone cure, it's bound to work as long as we do NATURE and PROFOUND THOUGHTS (lifted from guide books)

Oh my, when you put it like that it shows so clearly how silly it is. Parodied beautifully, with the increasingly exaggerated narrative, by Private Eye (for those who haven't had the fun before):

Raynor Winn's new book: The Garden Path