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?

What a brilliant interview. It’s true about people’s anger due to trusting Penguin, how we have become accustomed to advertisements and are pretty clued up about their claims and therefore trusted Penguin not to sell us a lie.

Has this been shared recently? It is the video of OC's Q&A at Sunday Newspapers Live back in December 2025. They only put it on Youtube a few days ago.

Nearly a year old but this FB comment has aged well!

Yes, very well said. We’ve found out since then that it’s the whole family unit, which was a surprise to me. Initially some of us even had thoughts that Sally was operating independently and coercing Moth in some way (or vice versa). We know that simply isn’t true. We barely considered that they were actually always working together as a team. Like the proposed origins of the chicken shop story, something quite ridiculous that was made up as entertainment around the kitchen table, I believe TSP arrived the same way, an idea to write a book about their experience as backpackers one summer but embellished with some far fetched fiction told as fact.

Yes that has held up well - but he has a criminologist chum called Robin Banks?

I think Philip A is a comic children’s writer, so he would definitely have a criminologist friend called Robin Banks. And a lawyer friend called Sue Yoo. 😀

So Sally's next effort and nom de plume: Falling from a Headland by Eileen Dover

Raynor Winn's name change - troubling according to a psychotherapist!

Raynor Winn's name change...

Thanks, I hadn't seen this before. I feel that this comment is very relevant currently:

She clearly loves her celebrity lifestyle and being lauded as a paragon and an inspiration. It is also telling, I think that Mr Walker remains silent.

Thanks for that @ThompsonTwin . I think everything she says has been voiced by us and nice to have that validation. I agree about Moth’s silence. The answer is really that they are both literally as “thick as thieves”, else he’d have left by now or made a statement or given himself up to medical science or something.

Yes indeed. We are watching the reinvented self trying to grab back the scattered remains as much as possible, like a Terminator, it won’t give in or give up.

Hello, sorry to gate-crash your thread - I do like to dip and read sometimes! I was dropping some books off in an Oxfam bookshop earlier and had a browse. There were the ubiquitous copies of The Salt Path & sequels in the Natural History section. Couldn't resist just dropping a copy down one shelf to somewhere more appropriate!

Very good @PrimalScreaming ! You are most welcome, our charabanc can extend to accommodate all travellers, plus copious supplies of cider, fudge, etc....

But didn't various people who knew or met them say that the couple continued to refer to themselves as Tim and Sally? In which case, their use of different names in connection with the book and publicity seems unlikely to be due to any profound psychological reason.

Wasn’t that before she wrote the book though? She hadn’t started to reinvent herself at that point, she was just escaping the aftermath.

A friend of mine who knew them when they lived at Haye Farm called them Raynor and Tim

I was just looking up Ruth Saberton, in this connection. She seems to refer consistently to Ray, Moth, and the Winns. Back in 2015 - before TSP - we know they told the Parsons they were Sal and Tim.

She changed her name when she wrote the first book and set up the publishing company so that it looked like a different person, she also changed her name when she wrote LSB/TSP for anonymity. I think it’s a mixture of various reasons, of wanting anonymity, the psychological need to reinvent and escape the past and also the commercially practical need to be the people that readers took into their hearts. We’ve noticed that the carefully curated IG feeds are pushing the Ray and Moth personas despite no updates about Moth’s health. We’ve thought that there has been a PR push recently maybe from Rowan Alice, to prepare us for OWH despite the fact that Penguin doesn't seem to have got involved with that and that needs the two unsullied characters from the previous three books.
Sally Walker is business and tech savvy unlike her wild child alter ego who has been trained for nothing and is completely unemployable but who stumbled into the realm of bestselling authors completely by accident. I believe Sally Walker did a lot of research in order to make that happen. I think she loved playing at being Raynor and being given another fresh start and as the psychologist points out, neither of them ever seemed to bat an eyelid when faced with the people who believed them. There’s no doubt she wanted to take credit for curing Tim and she is guilty of spreading a message to CBT sufferers which is nothing but misinformation.

@HatStickBoots Sally Walker is business and tech savvy unlike her wild child alter ego who has been trained for nothing and is completely unemployable

I have a new proposal for her, how about:

Being Raynor: The real story of one of the most notorious nature writers in Britain today

(for those amongst us who are not so low-brow as me - this is a take on Being Jordan)

Brilliant idea @BrandiedAromatics !
Mentioning Ruth Saberton, thank you for looking back at her articles and finding that out. Moth being a deviation of the name Timothy would have been easier to switch back and forth between. Ruth Saberton didn’t get a chance to find out who they really were or even much of who they were pretending to be at that point, but Bill Cole only knew the people from the book and probably didn’t care that their legal name was Walker.

On the first anniversary of OC’s expose about The Salt Path scandal, it’s perhaps an opportune moment to try and tie up some loose ends surrounding this sorry saga. Many of the remaining questions can only be answered by Sal and Moth, but there are some issues that are still worth examining. I wouldn’t bet against the trusty charabanc having a good few more miles left in it yet!

Who Dares Winns

• Like How not to Dal dy Dir, is TSP anything more than a work of pure fiction? Not involving weird and wonderful goings on in a remote part of North Wales but a fictional account of a few short walks on the SWCP that may have taken place over a 3-4 year period interlaced with unbelievable episodes (repossession of house in Wales and diagnosis with CBD in the same week) as well as a host of unlikely encounters with colourful individuals. In a work of fiction it would be stretching the plotline, but as a 100% honest travelogue it’s stretching the bounds of credulity to the limits! In hindsight, perhaps the most incredible aspect of the whole scandal is that so many people were fooled for so long!

• Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. Who would have thought back in 2005 when Sally Walker was working for the Hemmings and Tim Walker was working at the NT property at Plas-yn-Rhiw, that 20 years later Sal would have morphed into multi-million copy bestselling author Raynor Winn, feted the length and breadth of the land as a national treasure and that she would be treading the red carpet in the West End in a biopic featuring legends of the silver screen, Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.

When did the rot set in?

• One school contemporary of Sal’s claimed she had a reputation as a cheat! She did actually win a school prize for art in 1979! Another family member claimed that Sal used to offer relatives free stays at the White House Hotel at Abersoch when she worked there as a bookkeeper although it’s not clear if this lay behind her departure.

• The first credible evidence of criminal activity on Sal’s part seems to have come during her time working for Martin Hemmings from around 2000 but her time working at the White House Hotel may have given her an inkling of how easy it was to pull the wool over the eyes of an indulgent and sometimes absent owner.

The Business Deal that went pear shaped

• Was the failed business deal that led to Pen-y-maes being repossessed nothing more than a botched attempt to renovate the French property which they bought in 2007 and was adjacent to their brother’s pigeonnier in the same small hamlet? Was Cooper in fact Moth’s brother Martin (a childhood friend riding their trikes together) and did they remortgage Pen-y-maes (at the height of the UK property bubble) to purchase the French property thereby increasing the pressure on Sal to make ends meet and pay the mortgage by stealing greater sums from the Hemmings?

• Did Raymoth ever intend to move to France for a fresh start? As far as we know they didn’t speak a word of French while they had strong ties to the UK while their children were studying there.

• Was the midnight flit from Pen-y-maes and the Salt Path walk a carefully planned attempt to escape from their creditors in Wales and forge a new identity in Cornwall?

Wherever I lay my hat that’s my home

• Were Raymoth ever really homeless in the true sense of the word? They had several months to make arrangements for their possessions to be packed and stored at Polly’s before they left Pen-y-maes and start their walk. They seem to have organised their stay with Polly before their departure and it seems highly probable that they never planned to walk further than Land’s End where they ended up on 15 September 2013.

• The 18 months they spent with Polly seems to have been in a former meat packing shed which was converted into comfortable accommodation.

• As well as staying at Sal’s mother’s home for a while after thy left Polly’s, they had stints staying at Moth’s brother and sister’s homes and were able to find accommodation in Polruan and Haye Farm. Difficult, therefore, to describe them as truly homeless and being consequently shunned by many of those they met on the walk.

• Did they really go to a soup kitchen for the homeless in Newquay run by St Petroc’s or were they staying with their son there? Did they really spend a night in a forest encampment with a group of homeless people outside Weymouth who sound suspiciously as though they had just stepped out of Thomas Hardy’s novel ‘The Woodlanders’?

• Where did the homeless angle emanate from? Did Sal get the idea from Julie who worked with the homeless near Lancaster? Chapter 3 in TSP about the homeless (Rogues and vagabonds) almost looks as though it was lifted lock stock and barrel from a 2010 issue of The Pavement, a periodical about homeless issues in which Julie from Up North also features.

Paddy Power and The Big Walk

• Raymoth appear to have conned and manipulated many of the people they have encountered in life. Was Paddy Dillon (the author of the Cicerone SWCP guide) yet another example of this pattern of behaviour? Did they just use his guidebook as part of a ‘virtual walk’ along sections of the SWCP, making a lot of it up as they went along?

• If they started the SWCP at Minehead (as described in TSP) why has Sal never published any of the photos that she claimed they took in front of the SWCP marker post there as described in TSP? After all she published photos of her and Moth at the marker point at the end of the SWCP at South Haven Point. Did they actually start the walk in Minehead at all? The bus trip there with the rowdy Americans, appears contrived. Why didn’t Jan give them a lift all the way to the start point rather than dropping them off outside Taunton?

• Did the visit to Glastonbury occur as described or was it shoehorned into the narrative to spice things up and explain Moth’s dodgy back? Jan (Moth’s sister) lived in Bristol, not Yeovil, so why would they be anywhere near Glastonbury which is nowhere near the start of the SWCP?

• Was the walk initially anything more than an opportunity to visit their son Tristan who was at university at Newquay and whom they visited for a few days’ body boarding before apparently starting off from Minehead? Armed with a radio (for the Test match) as well as pots (for the noodles), an outsized frying pan as well as a notebook, the walk was more 500-mile porkies than 500-mile walkies!

Noodles and Fudge

• Is it remotely feasible for a reasonably fit person to walk all 630 miles of the SWCP, (with an elevation four times the height of Everest), on a diet of fudge bars and noodles, let alone somebody who has been given a diagnosis of terminal CBD and can barely get his coat on? The account of virtually everybody, in reasonably good health who has undertaken the walk in one go, suggests not! As for those suffering from severe neurological conditions such as CBD or Parkinsons, such arduous endeavours aren’t recommended by the medical profession for obvious reasons!

• If they walked some of the SWCP in 2014/15 were they still claiming working tax credits? If they were receiving PIP, then this would almost certainly have exceeded £48pw and allowed them to eat far less frugally than on just noodles and fudge. Perhaps this explains the reference to eating a mackerel salad in a café at Lamorna Cove in the margins of Paddy Dillon’s SWCP guide!

• According to Polly, Sal only worked a couple of days as a sheep bagger before chucking in the towel. If so, what were they using to fund their walk in 2015? Perhaps it was all thanks to the largesse of the DWP which funded Moth’s PIP payments!

A case of mistaken identity?

• Was Moth ever mistaken for Simon Armitage? Did they just come up with the idea when they saw a flyer about his upcoming visit in the window of a museum during the St Ives Festival? Was the notion of being mistaken for the future poet laureate, just another of Moth’s Walter Mitty fantasies? Are any of the other cases of mistaken identity for Simon Armitage any more likely than the boozy innuendo filled evening with Grant, which has since been revealed by Warren Evans as being totally contrived.

• Was the personality of Grant based on a London based wine merchant who has a house in North Cornwall and enjoys surfing while on holiday there whom Raymoth could have met on their walk a few days before encountering Warren Evans? If so, it was a cruel irony that his character was transposed onto Warren Evans, an avowed teetotaller from a Mormon family with an au pair looking after a disabled child.

• Did the Beowulf poetry reading really take place as described in St Ives? During the St Ives Festival busking is tightly controlled. Buskers in spots on the promenade usually display donation buckets provided and endorsed by the local town council. Did Raymoth see some of these buskers in action and subsequently come up with the idea of a Beowulf poetry recital in honour of Seamus Heaney which a brief trawl of the internet would have revealed had died at roughly the same time? Did Moth really take a copy of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf with him on every walk over the years? The copy he’s shown holding in one of Sal’s IG posts, looks remarkably pristine!

A terminal illness and a miracle cure

• If long distance walking was indeed a miracle cure for CBD (or whatever ailment Moth may have been suffering from), why didn’t Raymoth bother to do any walks along Offa’s Dyke Path during the 18 months they were staying with Polly?

• If Moth was indeed as ill as Sal claimed (hardly able to climb to the top of the hill outside Haye Farm at the beginning of LL), how come none of their neighbours such as Ruth Saberton, ever saw any indication of this as he effortless climbed into his Landrover or clambered onto a ride-on mower?

• If Moth was as ill as claimed in TSP, how come Polly saw no evidence of this during the 18 months that they stayed with her in 2013-2015? Apparently various family members believed Moth could have been suffering from ailments ranging from a nasal fungus to Parkinson’s, there was never any mention of CBD, possibly because the initial tentative diagnosis didn’t occur until June 2015.

• Far from being “the top dog in his field”, RD, the consultant at the Walton Centre in Liverpool who gave Moth the original tentative CBD diagnosis, specialised in neurological conditions related to aging. If Sal and Moth were so convinced that the CBD diagnosis was wrong (as claimed in TSP), how come there is no evidence that they ever sought a second opinion?

The Mystery of the Minack

• How does one square Sal’s account of attending the CAMDRAM performance of Iolanthe at the Minack Theatre on the 16th February 2013 with Moth’s margin comments in Paddy Dillon’s SWCP guidebook which opaquely refer to “Great Expectations” at the Minack and Tristran’s FB post that he ferried his parents back to Bristol on the 17th September?

• A performance of Great Expectations took place at the Minack from 8-12 September 2014, while the CAMDRAM Iolanthe performance at the Minack took place from 15-19 September 2013! Rather than walking to the Minack from 15-16 September, might Raymoth have simply got a bus (with £2.50 and a hairy wine gum in their pockets) from Land’s End to Newquay, stayed a couple of day’s with Tristran and got a lift with back to Bristol on the 17th September? Might they have walked a short stretch of the SWCP in September 2014, seen the advert for Great Expectations at the Minack and then stitched the previous year’s Iolanthe performance into the narrative to give the appearance of a continuous walk which finished in Polruan in early October 2013?

• Was the entire Minack episode just another thinly veiled attempt to take a dig at the idle over privileged rich (Rowena Cade the founder of the Minack), in the same vein as similar sniping remarks about the owner of the Clovelly Estate ( catapulting turkeys during Christmas pheasant shoots), Grant (whose father had pulled strings to get him a job with a wine merchant) and the Rashleighs at Menabilly who had made their fortune by exploiting the workers in their China clay mines near St Austell?

• It’s ironic that having slagged off the Minack and it’s founder in TSP, Sal should return there in 2022 for a sell-out show with Gigspanner!

Slumming it at Polly’s

• Why didn’t Sal mention the small fact in TSP that rather than her and Moth being treated like latter day slaves while staying at Polly’s, they had in fact been the beneficiaries of her generosity, including being given money and being allowed to spend evenings together on the farm in her hot tub?

• As a recipient of such generosity, why did Sal include in the first draft of LSB the explanation for their being evicted from Polly’s as the fact that she (Polly) didn’t want her young children to see Moth choking to death on his own vomit as CBD took it final toll on his health? Highly ironic, in so far as the first tentative diagnosis of Moth’s CBD didn’t take place until June 2015, AFTER they had left Polly’s!

• Why was Polly portrayed as a modern day gangmaster who heartlessly evicted them to rent out the meat packing shed to another tenant when in fact she reluctantly asked Sal and Moth to leave after 18 months due to the pressures of running a farm single handedly while bringing up two young children?

A funny thing happened on the way to Polruan

• Did Raymoth meet Anna by chance in September 2015 outside Polruan just weeks before Moth was due to start his course at Plymouth University? If so, why did the café owner at Millendreath describe a similar episode taking place at his café in 2016? Did Raymoth in fact rent a flat near the university at St Austell for the first year of Moth’s course in 2015 and did they only meet Anna after she placed an advert somewhere that her flat was available for rent. If the encounter with Anna did occur as described in TSP, why was she so reluctant to talk to OC?

• Was the peregrine soothsayer at Pencarrow Head based on a local eccentric who lived in woods near Polruan called the chicken man whom Raymoth may have heard about or encountered while they lived at Polruan?

• How come so few people in Polruan remember Raymoth if they lived there from 2014-2019? Apart from the village shop assistant (who referred to Ray as Raynor Whinge!), Tom Barrie Simmons and one other local who bumped into them a couple of times walking Monty, they remained completely unknown. Were they hiding from something? Did they in fact live in Polruan for a much shorter period than claimed (Sept 2016-Jan 2019)? Why wouldn’t Anna talk to OC?

Ray at Haye

• Was the move to Haye Farm part of a calculated plan to turn Raymoth into rewilders and beef up their environmental credentials for TWS, the sequal to TSP?

• Did any rewilding ever happen at Haye? The previous owner of Haye Farm has claimed that it was a thriving wildlife habitat when she lived there rather than something akin to a nuclear wasteland! Moth’s eco-friendly wood piles which took the world of science by storm look suspiciously like brash!

• Did Sal manipulate Bill Cole by portraying herself and Moth as victims and try to prevent people coming to Haye farm on the pretext of protecting Moth, when the truth was much simpler – there was little wrong with Moth and little was done to turn the orchard into a commercial enterprise while they stayed there?

• Did Sal deliberately make up stories (the previous occupier of Haye Farm chucking a sheep down a well to poison the water supply/a neighbour threatening to sue Bill Cole if she was thrown off her horse while riding across Haye Farm/turning Bill Cole against local farmers with trumped up allegations of misdemeanours as well as a deterring a pomologist/apple expert from visiting Haye) to isolate Bill Cole and prevent prying eyes seeing how they spent their time at Haye?

• Was their flit from Haye (keys pushed through the letter box with a short scrawled note to Bill Cole announcing they were ending their tenancy prematurely), connected to the fact that Bill Cole had rumbled them after reading the account of Moth’s miraculous clear DaTScan in Landlines, at a time when he had told Bill Cole that his doctor had given him just weeks to live? Was the glue in the door locks and the removal of the carpets at Haye Farm, a deliberate act of spite to repay Bill Cole for his generosity, allowing them to live there rent free for three years?

The Talented Mr Winn

• Moth is a born storyteller, something Sal alludes to in TSP. That begs the question, how many of the anecdotes in TSP were created by Moth - articulate, well read with a vivid imagination? Grant? The Beowulf reading at St Ives? The encounter with Betsie, the American lady who was looking for John Le Carre’s house? The meeting with Kurt and the colony of surfers? The encounter with the eccentrically attired gentleman walking a tortoise on a lead near Pencarrow Head?

• Moth appears to fancy himself as a traveller and a sportsman. He claimed to a young shepherdess at Haye that he had herded sheep with cats in Ecuador. He claimed to the owner of the village shop in Penpol that he had once played for Notts Forest youth team (as well as being a talented rugby league player and track and field enthusiast as an 18-year-old in the US!), which the shop owner just happened to support! He claimed to a neighbour that he’d possibly developed CBD due to pesticides he’d come into contact with while working as a crop sprayer in the US, knowing that this person was an ardent environmentalist. He claimed that he’d once discovered a cache of fob watches wrapped in velvet with love letters, guarded by witch bottles in a grate in a chimney at Pen-y-maes, a story curiously similar to the plotline of a novel written by Ruth Saberton (The Letter), yet when the current owner, Maxine Farrimond, searched the chimney (where Moth claimed he had put them back), she found nothing! Tall stories or clever psychological manipulation?

• Moth and Ray appear to have wrapped Bill Cole around their little finger. They were trusted to run the orchard, Bill Cole considered gifting the orchard to Raymoth and they were treated as such close friends that Sal stayed with Bill Cole at his home in Surrey and gave a talk at his children’s school! Did he create this position of trust by playing on the knowledge that Bill Cole had suffered financial losses not dissimilar to the purported loss of Pen-y-maes and did his CBD diagnosis tug at the heart strings of somebody whose wife was suffering from cancer?

• Is Moth a harmless serial fantasist/Walter Mitty type figure ( a jobbing gardener at the NT masquerading as a qualified botanist/a middle aged armchair sports fan vaunting impressive youthful sporting achievements/ a dabbler in Old English poetry mistaken for the poet laureate) or something more sinister - a cynical psychological manipulator of people’s emotions and vulnerabilities, without a shred of compassion for his victims?

The Big Issue and the Book deal

• Is it significant that Sal’s Raynor Winn IG account was set up within days (26 Oct 2016) of her agent’s (Jen Christie)?

• Is it significant that Jen Christie forged a career as a ghost writer before she became a literary agent?

• Was Sal’s email to The Big Issue in May 2017 an off the cuff attempt to find an outlet for her story or was it part of a cleverly targeted marketing campaign, orchestrated in part by her literary agent? The email is signed with her pen name, Raynor Winn.

• Was the schtick about the first manuscript about their walk being planned purely as a birthday present for Moth before he lost his memory, simply a clever piece of marketing designed to tug at the heart strings of the reading public?

• If TSP was based largely on the pencilled margin comments made by Moth in Paddy Dillon’s SWCP guidebook, how come the only photo we have of these notes appears to show all the pages of the guidebook after the Mousehole section as being in virtual pristine condition?

• As for the title, did Sal plagiarise it (and Saltlines) from ‘The Salt Road’, a theatrical performance by the Cornish troupe, Bagas Degol which toured Cornish coastal village halls from 2015-2018. Sal apparently was seen at one of the performances in 2017, the point at which Lightly Salted Blackberries was renamed as The Salt Path. A very salty coincidence!

Pick up a Penguin!

• PRH’s blurb on the back cover of TSP runs as follows: Just days after Raynor Winn learned that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years was terminally ill, they lost their home and livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they impulsively decided to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. Living wild and free, at the mercy of the sea and sky, they discovered a new, liberating existence – but what would they find at their journey’s end?

• Yet the tentative diagnosis of a terminal illness took place nearly two years after the house repossession not just days later.

• Medical letters produced by Sal never gave any timeframe for the progression of the disease other than saying it was atypical and indolent.

• There is no indication that they had little time left when they embarked on the walk or that it was an impulsive decision caused by Sal spotting an old book about a walk on the South West Coast path (500 mile Walkies) in a packing case as they were being evicted. Author Phoebe Smith who wrote a book about wild camping around the UK (Extreme Sleeps) which included a chapter on wild camping in the Lizard Peninsula, wrote in an article that Raynor Winn told her she had read her book about wild camping before they lost Pen-y-maes, which doesn’t quite gel with the notion of an impulsive decision to walk the SWCP!

• Moth wasn’t Raynor’s husband of thirty-two years. They were married in August 1986, meaning that in July 2013 they had been married for only twenty-seven years.

• So where was the due diligence from PRH to check any of these so called “facts”?

Forgot to bring the sunhat and the moral compass!

• For 7 years (from the publication of TSP in March 2018 to the launch of the film in May 2025), Raymoth were serenaded in the media as icons of virtue and beacons of hope. Over the years they doubled down on their lies and deception and made no attempt to provide a corrective narrative to explain Moth’s miraculous survival with CBD. If anything, their dishonesty increased with the walk from Cape Wrath to Polruan and Moth’s fund-raising efforts for PSPA walking the London Marathon and the Thames Path.

• How can this carefully crafted image of two virtuous individuals fighting back against social injustice and overcoming the insurmountable challenges that life threw at them be squared with reality? Having Christmas lunch with the Hemmings while stealing from them and forging cheques to the tune of £64,000 and seeing Martin Hemmings go to his grave, a broken man? Stealing £10,000 from Sal’s mother as well as £20,000 from Moth’s parents and seeing his father end his days in penury in North Wales while they enjoyed the royalties from Sal’s multimillion book sales and financed lavish holidays for their kids?

• How could they invent anecdotes in TSP which deliberately misrepresented and maligned businesses (the café owner at Mullion Cove, Tadge the campsite attendant at Treen), institutions (the religious retreat at Lee Abbey), charities (the NCI at St Alban’s Head and the benefactor who set up the Minack Theatre) and family members ( Polly) and individuals encountered on the walk (Warren Evans, the Parsons, random dog walkers, university student actors etc) as well as take advantage of the generosity and kindness of strangers (Bill Coles, Warren Evans) which they then proceeded to exploit and ultimately betray the trust placed in them?

• Will they ever show any remorse for their misdemeanours, or will they continue to shamelessly claim that “nothing has changed” even if “mistakes were made”.

The (Four) Hare(s) and the Tortoise

• Was ‘Four Hares Ltd’ deliberately chosen as the name of the company set up to receive the Walkers’ ill-gotten gains? Does the name allude to the speed and agility of the four hares ( aka Tim, Sal, Tristan and Alice) compared to the tortoise which appeared in TSP and is perhaps a metaphor for the doting media and dopey general reading public who have been conned right royally into believing there was a shred of truth attached to TSP and its sequels?

• Were the children involved in the deception right from the start? Did Raymoth stay with Tristan in Newquay and was the incident involving the encounter with the homeless, subsequently added for dramatic effect?

• If Tristan spent time bodyboarding with his parents in Newquay before they embarked on their walk, if he ferried food and supplies to them at various stages of the walk (as claimed by Polly) and if he gave them a lift from Lands End to Bristol, then he must have realised that much of TSP was pure fiction.

• Tristan spent at least one Christmas with his parents at Polly’s so he must have known that the description of the meat packing shed and his parent’s life there in TSP was far from the truth.

• How involved in the deception was Alice? Why did she and Fenella Bates (Sal’s editor) follow each other on IG? Did she contact Polly and attempt to muzzle her and persuade her to withdraw her allegations about Sal’s theft and confession letter to her mother?

• Was the purchase of a house in Newquay in March 2025 for Tristan made by Sal and was it in some sense a reward for his contribution to the team effort that lay behind TSP?

Quo Vadis?

• The luxury farmhouse they are renting at Gweek, apparently costs them £5-7,000pm in rent. How long can they continue living in opulence there while book sales stagnate and Sal slowly fades into obscurity?

• Will OWH ever see the light of day following OC’s Observer revelations and the likely tsunami of negative reviews if it ever appears and attempts to rehash old porkies?

• Are Raymoth destined to suffer from ‘The Ronnie Biggs dilemma’? This was the paradox that faced Ronnie Biggs, who pulled off the biggest heist in British history as part of the Great Train Robbery in 1963. After fleeing the UK, pursued by the intrepid Inspector Jack Slipper of the Yard he escaped to Brazil (which had no extradition treaty with the UK) where he enjoyed a cult status as one of the masterminds of the Great Train Robbery. After 40 years in exile he was faced with the paradox of whether to remain in Brazil or return to the UK to see his family before he died and face the music in the shape of a lengthy prison sentence for having killed one of the guards on the train that he robbed. Does Sal continue to live a life of tight-lipped solitude in southwest Cornwall, or does she finally find the gumption to spill the beans and fess up to her many crimes and misdemeanours?

• There is one final question that is perhaps worth asking one year on from OC’s Observer revelations. Will Raynor Winn, PRH, her agent and her legion of brainwashed fans ever wake up and realise that in the dystopian world we live in, now, more than ever, the truth really matters and that far from being an unflinchingly honest account of a 630 mile walk along the SWCP, TSP is nothing more than a fictionalised account of a few short walks undertaken by two fairly healthy 50 year olds with a bit of time on their hands and the ability to weave a web of deceit to create a modern fairy tale for our times!

Brilliant round up of all the issues.

Happy Anniversary to us! @ThompsonTwin — all excellent questions, and a magisterial setting out of matters!

A couple of things you’ve said here are news to me (‘Polly’ throwing them out because she didn’t want her children to see TW choking on his own vomit according to a draft of LSB, the supposed cache of watches, love letters and witch bottles at Pen y Maes, the Haye Farm neighbour supposedly poisoning the well and threatening to sue if she was thrown from her horse). Did I just miss these details in the Observer or elsewhere, or are these from your own sources? I think I’m right in remembering that you had your own source/s of information…?

Own sources....

I did think I couldn’t have missed such interesting tidbits! What you suggest about SW and TW trying to create distance and hostility between BC and neighbours makes sense to me. And if they’d stayed with him and his family at his home in Surrey and SW had given a talk at his children’s school, that’s an even nastier wholescale betrayal. We’re straight back to their treatment of the Hemmings and betraying people who treated you as family — only, of course, for the Walkers, family members are just there to be exploited and stolen from, anyway, so I suppose there’s a consistency there!