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?

You’re welcome. My guess is the story is so ridiculous that even Penguin thought, “Yeah… best get rid of that.” 🤣 Or maybe it’s part of a slow, quiet process of distancing themselves from “Raynor and Moth.” I do wonder what the sales figures look like these days.

I also wonder whether people were asking why, when her daughter had been uncharacteristically out of contact for three whole days during a national pandemic, Sal didn't ask the local police to go round and do a wellness check on her own daughter.

Not sure if this has been posted in an earlier thread, but here is an archive of the chicken shop piece:

web.archive.org/web/20250708144458/www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/raynor-winn-lockdown-hope

An extremely strange piece of writing. I'm surprised Penguin didn't ask her if she was ok. I mean, maybe they did, but they published it anyway.

To be honest, when it's just stuff for the publishers' blogs or publicity bits, I think they shove it up online without much attention. I've subbed blog posts for my publishers where I've made a shocking spelling or grammatical error and it's gone up literally as is, when a brief eye cast over it would have made changes.

So I doubt if anyone at Penguin even read it.

Oh my …… just finished reading that piece..
Thank you so much @reallyalurker !
Ugh, the way she writes! The lies about Haye Farm make me sooooooooooo ANGRY.
It was presumably her daughter’s choice to live in London ffs.
The ungrateful way she writes about the home they rented in Polruan.
“Reasons for hope”. Talk about completely missing the point here and turning everything around, sanctimonious as ever.
Yes indeed @Vroomfondleswaistcoat on all counts.

Yes, it’s a deeply odd, smug and weirdly incurious piece of writing, which completely sidesteps the obvious things like how she eventually got out, why they didn’t call the police if the daughter usually called daily and suddenly went AWOL (I mean, if they called her, they’d have heard her phone repeatedly ring out), why it took supposedly falling through a chicken shop roof to become ‘the main character in her own life story’ (?) and why the text bears no relationship whatsoever to the title (it didn’t teach SW anything about lockdown or parenting, surely?), not to mention things like why the daughter was supposedly writing a life plan on a whiteboard in her flat, and then miraculously found another whiteboard to signal to passersby in the chickenshop, or whether anyone, vegan or not, is going to start defrosting chickens and trying to figure out how to use commercial cooking equipment when trapped in a shop.

I actually just don’t believe any of it happened as described. I lived in London for years, and of course a passerby would have called the police if an obviously distressed young woman, possibly only wearing a bikini and towel, was banging on the window of a closed shop or holding up a sign. Especially if she was still there when you returned after your allowed single period of exercise. This is just a version of SW’s ‘all the rich cream tea eaters on the SWCP called us tramps’ characterisation of other people. For another thing, everyone I know who lived alone during lockdown had a system of check-ins with friends.

And as is obvious to anyone not ridiculously prejudiced about London (like SW), it’s a hugely nature-rich, biodiverse environment. It has 4,000,000 gardens as well as thousands of parks, cemeteries, railway cuttings, canals, wetlands, rivers, woodland etc etc. It’s probably far more biodiverse than a lot of monocultural agricultural land.

I imagine SW or someone said ‘Well, be careful on that roof when you’re sunbathing. Imagine if you fell through and were a vegan trapped in a chickenshop!’ and then SW decided to write it up as some kind of clumsy parable about the ills of urban life versus watching blue tits nest build.

Thank you @reallyalurker for sharing, I totally agree about the writing @HatStickBoots, the daughter wanted to live in London, which happens to best region in the UK for access to green spaces per capita, according to a quick Google :)

Thank you so much @reallyalurker !!
it’s difficult to know whether to laugh or cringe.
The story is a masterpiece of creative fiction.

Thank you @Oeufs perfect.
It’s this kind of exploitation of people’s sentiments which really gets me. Not knowing any different at the time of reading, I was really pleased that the pair of them could see the problems with Haye farm. The bleak picture she described really upset me as intended.
I can’t imagine why a vegan would choose to live above a chicken shop in the first place. You just wouldn’t and everything else you say sounds right too. It’s another example of those stories that are supposed to provide split second entertainment and humour to deflect from reality but somehow when she writes, it becomes a maudlin monologue, the Czechoslovakian version of Walt Disney although that’s too much of a compliment because I’m a fan of the former. Perhaps it should be the other way around? I don’t know. I hope people know what I’m trying to convey!

Thank you @DisappointedReader for the new thread.

Happy Anniversary to everyone. Congratulations on creating a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion on the bogus memoirs of SW and the associated Walker-family grifting that has been revealed since OC's expose.

I do find it fascinating how all the Walker clan like to hide made up identities, it makes me think that by creating such personae absolves them from work-based embezzlement, family theft/financial elder abuse and dishonestly treating all that cross their paths to make SW and TW 'seem to be' more virtuous and honourable than they are. I like and agree with @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree comments that SW has 'become' the Raynor Winn personae, whose story is 'unflinchingly honest and true' and thereby separates RW from SW (it sounds a bit like a Doctor Who regeneration!) I would hope if SW has 'regenerated into RW that there is someting like Oscar Wilde's A Picture of Dorian Gray, that the SW behind RW is eaten away by her own corruption and dishonesty, which is inescapable as she is constantly reminded of it by TSP dissenters on IG and other SM platforms. It is probably very unlikely, having watched and listened to Scamanda series and podcast, both of which showed the perpetrator oblivious to her crimes and damage that she had created. Can SW really be sustained by the SM adulation she receives via IG? That is only virtual, not real, and it allows SW's critics to 'gatecrash' and remind the IG fans what the reality was - fraud, theft and dishonesty. In one of last OC's links posted here OC said she felt that SW was all but cancelled. And such personal appearances must be 'sustaining' than the virtual SM love and adulation. Would there really be an desire to have SW sitting on some chat show couch post January 2028 promoting OWH? To have SW in the guise of RW appearing at literature festivals - SW will take questions - but not on: misunderstandings regarding her embezzlement crimes; were any of the walks actually undertaken; how could TW talk so expertly regarding apple farming when no work had ever been undertaken at Haye; why doesn't stealing the savings of elderly relatives constitute elder abuse etc. It would be a very limited personal appearance!

Of course she doesn’t miss the money or the adulation—who on earth gets attached to things like that? Raynor, the free spirited child , surely doesn’t.

I don’t think she’ll ever reappear in public. Those IG posts are just boredom dressed up as activity.

I'd forgotten @Thatwasonesteptofar that SW is a free spirited, unspoiled child of nature, even though both SW and TW place so much emphasis on the material - the Land Rover Discovery, the BoHo chic clothes so beloved of TW and the would be attempted renovation of the French Property etc. I always found that a contradictory statement that SW and TW were renovating the French property to save it from developers - surely they were being developers themselves? And the large property they now lease.

I do wonder in the grand scheme of things that there will be some financial hit to SW and TW, I seem to recall someone suggesting there might have been a plan to establish a wellness and writers/artists centre with SW holding forth on the healing power of nature and walks (whilst avoiding talking about the craft of being an author) with TW being 'twinkly' and charismatic to all female delegates (and potentially being a bit 'handsy' judging by how he hauled the women in the green suit towards him in that Tik Tok clip that was posted here) as well as being a "hail fellow well met" to any male delegates. But I'm sure with TSP fandom there would be fools willing to part with their hard earned money for such an experience, and the Walkers would be only too willing to 'accept' Though how could they guarantee there were no MN infiltrators to ruin such a paradise.

I have a longstanding amateur interest in British herbs and wildflowers. I've recently reflected that one of the things that really bothered and disappointed me about TSP even before all the scandal blew up, was SW's generic style of writing about plants. You'd think that growing up on a farm, and later living in the Welsh countryside, SW would have some close up knowledge of wildflowers, herbs, etc. Yet nothing indicating any real personal knowledge of or curiosity about wild plants and their properties comes across in the books. It's the same in Saltlines (you can see much of her prose for this for free on the Bandcamp Gigspanner page: https://gigspanner.bandcamp.com/album/saltlines )

Even when she does talk specifically about plants in Saltlines, it's purely a generic list of names of vaguely coastal plants such as you could find in any reference book. For instance in The Pollen Path:

Cow-parsley, clematis, achillea, elderflower, and heather.

Clover, bluebells, thistles, and nettles.

Royal fern, willow herb, alexanders, comfrey, and tamarisk.

Stitchwort, gorse, hawthorn, and wild garlic.

Water mint, thyme, samphire, and wild strawberries.

Quite an odd list - she is describing these plants as if they were seen on a specific walk she has taken, yet they are not plants that all flower at the same time and some of them grow in widely varying environments. That might not matter if she was trying to eg mystically depict a long path in all seasons. But what I'm left feeling is that she really doesn't know much about any of these plants, and has no real curiosity about them. Also I can't recall any place in TSP where she really describes a plant in any detail to make us see it, beyond telling us its name. This was one of the things that made it ring hollow to me from the start - it reads as if written with a reference book to hand, slotting coastal plant names into a route.

I wonder if others have also felt annoyed and let down by TSP's generic approach to plants in particular? It was one of the things that made me question the whole book.

This is what I have observed in what I have seen of her writing. It's generic. I have always understood that the point of a book is to make us see life a little differently, with a twist, with a nuance; to learn something new about the everyday. To see the magic in the quotidian, if you will forgive the authorly fluff.

Sal's writing is more like a recitation. Listing 'what you can see' is like writing 101. How does what you see make you feel? How can you describe it for an audience who might have no idea what it looks like?

In other news, I finally got to watch the 'Girlfriend Explains' YouTube commentary and, boy, does she hate Sal! I almost felt sorry for the Walkers by the time I'd got to the end...

Mmmmmmmmm… I’m thinking hard but can’t really recall anything like that in TSP @TheBookShelf .. I agree with you and have that same longstanding interest about flora and fauna. I recently bought a little handmade book, handwritten and illustrated by a young art student at a local fair, all about foraging for edible plants, she calls them weeds. I knew most of them but some I didn’t and it is a lovely little book in its own right.
If you’d mentioned your observations about this lack back when it was first published, you might have had the response that there was too much else on her mind and inner turmoil to be able to really see anything outside of that. Its real selling hooks were the homelessness, Moth’s illness and their secular relationship with each other that transcends everybody else’s humdrum and grey existence. Picking up the book now and going through the pages, the things which leap out to me the most are her cartoonish observations of other people, the Wikipedia extracts about the places they pass through and their experiences with the weather and their bodies. There are also a lot of her feelings. We now know that their walks on the SWCP were a series of holidays and everything that helped towards its publication.. even the acknowledgments at the end and the ‘about the author ‘This is her first book’ is a bloody mockery. Yes, I agree with you that even if this story was real, there would be so much more of the observations you’ve suggested based on both of their backgrounds and interests and the fact that she makes such a big show of being a part of nature, just because. The book was written when she had time to reflect upon more than the circumstances of the walk itself. She wrote Moth’s character as being one that had accepted his fate (it’s easy when the reality was different?) and might have appreciated a little more of the nature content which was lacking, his interests supposedly being inclined that way and the book itself being a gift.

Sal does briefly talk about the unwelcome proliferation of rhododendrons after Porlock Weir ( where Moth is shown grand standng on the entry gate posts to a large country house) and a few comments about spending an afternoon looking for Autumn Lady's Tresses orchids on the Lizard peninsula, but apart from that, not much! I think we can discount the boomeranging peregrine falcon, the dog leashed tortoise nbear Pencarrow Point and Smotyn, from the discussion!

That's exactly it @Vroomfondleswaistcoat - thanks. SW tells rather than shows. She lists, but doesn't make us see, or feel.

Thanks @HatStickBoots . SW does have the gift of making everything she describes seem flat and dull!

@TheBookShelf This was one of the things that made it ring hollow to me from the start - it reads as if written with a reference book to hand, slotting coastal plant names into a route.

Thanks for your whole piece - I am not surprised at this as I picked up a similar thing with the birds. I always own up - I haven't read any of the RW books but I have seen loads of extracts and heard lots of her interviews (for my sins, phew!) - she still has a E Midlands expectancy of what birds she will see, to me. So I have pointed out that you don't see that bird at that time of the year in Cornwall, for instance.

Where we did have some fun was over Haye Farm when the Walkers miraculous skills resulted in some amazing birds appearing in contrast to the former dull, plain, ones. It prompted me to share a song by The Carpenters, Close To You, dedicated to Moth:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNXtoTc6BYA&list=RDiNXtoTc6BYA&start_radio=1

Thanks @BrandiedAromatics - really interesting about the birds, I don't know a lot about birds so hadn't picked up on that aspect. Overall I think SW sees the coastal and countryside landscape as a sort of flat theatre backdrop against which to describe her own supposed adventures, or to showcase her supposed achievements (finding more interesting birds than anyone else! looking for rare orchids at the Lizard! really long walks! ) , rather than something alive and fascinating in its own right.

Thanks to you as well @reallyalurker - I tried to find it in an archive to no avail. We have some good researchers on this thread! I hadn't re-read it all before sharing about the birds ... so was amused that this also refers to the dull birds followed by the more rare, colourful ones. Maybe I did remember subliminally ... as I say I did listen to Sal a lot (eyes glaze over) ....

This, but I would say she doesn't 'describe', she 'recounts'. A little like a child in a 'what I did on my holidays' essay. 'Today we saw a gorse bush, a nettle, some brambles, a robin, a wren, a seagull and it rained.'

So what I was after with this lockdown article is - it gives us more about how Alice sees her life pan out. "She finally wrote her way into being the main character in her own life story". Except that it doesn't. It is very clunky and confusing - with the two whiteboards.

Sal gives us this juxtaposition of her nature-filled days and Alice's 3 day imprisonment. The enlightenment comes in the form of the 3rd lockdown, "my daughter picked up the phone having decided how to change her life."

"Wildflowers are pushing through the ground in abundance and the endangered yellowhammers are calling to each other from the hazel bushes." So Alice has decided to do what Sal thinks is pukka.

So the moral of the story is " just occasionally you have to rip the whiteboard off the wall and make it happen." What the one that says: ‘Help me, I’m trapped.’

Et in Arcadia ego.

Not sure if this has been posted before, but it came up in my YouTube timeline (I think YouTube has got me bang to rights). Our Chloe talking to an American channel about TSP and what went on.

Hopefully all this negative publicity in the US will help bring the grift to the attention of the American audience who might just be getting all the publicity for the film.

I believe that rhododendron chapter was lifted straight off the National trust’s signage and website everywhere they own and manage land in the county. Their work is controversial and opinion is quite divided about it. Raynor Winn appears to be putting forward her opinion rather than setting out the argument. What baffles me now, since we learned who they really are, is that Moth worked for the National Trust.