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?

Oh yes, that is the vibe I get. By the way, does your friend live in Crantock, maybe? And I thought the cats were in Guatemala but that may be me!

More typical grandiosity evidencing Pseudologia Fantastica as described upthread.

Moth said he had been teaching at a uni and also at he Eden project if I remember correctly.

Apologies - it was indeed Guatemala, not Ecuador! The friend who met SA lives in Calstock. Various other friends live on the SWCP (Clovelly, Bideford, Porthcurno, Bodinnick, Carswell etc)

What is your take on the pencilled margin comments that Moth made in PD's SWCP guide? What role (if any) did they play in TSP?

Ok I have a guilty confession to make. One of the reasons that I have become so involved in this thread is (despite being an ardent long distance walker and somebody who read TSP and was completely taken in by it) I have less interest in uncovering the truth behind Sally Walker/Raynor Winn's misdemeanours than answering the following question. In an age of AI, what value do we place on "authenticity" vs "fiction"?

I've been fascinated by this question since reading the works of Philip.k.Dick as a teenager. "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" ( aka Bladerunner) asks the fundamental question, what does it mean to be human.

As far as fiction is concerned, I think the genre faces massive challenges, hence why PRH may have been reluctant to engage in the controversy surrounding TSP.

If you are an author ( a lazy or untalented one maybe!) what is to prevent you from writing an initial chapter and then handing over the rest of the novel to AI. "Please replicate my style in chpt1 and and the story lines of best sellers over the last 5 years."

You can try the same trick with travelogues apart from one small detail - they need to be authentic. AI can fact check and attribute likely authenticity to this genre in a way that wasn't the case when TSP was first published in March 2018.

So ironically, AI may in fact empower authentic travelogues and sift out snake oil offerings like TSP by asking rather basic questions such as 'what is the baseline survival rate for individuals suffering from CBD?'....

I reckon they were notes made either during one of their short walking holidays or afterwards during their brainstorming sessions. No doubt such notes were useful and an intentional aide-memoir to thread a convincing story together from disparate trips.

I am convinced they set out to write a story that farmed their own experiences for inspiration. Much like HNTDDD, but better having honed their skills. For example. "Oh, Tim we must include your tentative diagnosis...that will really tug at the heartstrings. And technically it is sort of true." I am also convinced that the more they engineered the story the more they actually believed it.

@ThompsonTwin In an age of AI, what value do we place on "authenticity" vs "fiction"?
I think it is interesting and may have been very relevant to the Raynor Winn brand, if they hadn't been rumbled. OWH could be worked over AI fiction posing as real travel writing.

I looked to see if there was a relevant thread on MN - there was one a few months ago called A.I. fiction and the backlash - and on that someone was celebrating the authors they have enjoyed. One of these was Patrick Leigh Fermor - but you see he made up riding on a horse for part of his journey, even though other sections are well-authenticated.

Other well thought of travel writers like Bruce Chatwin have a very authentic book and a very inauthentic book to their name. A lot of it depends on what you know yourself, what you have experienced and what you connect with.

The article from Sydney, I shared earlier said this:

Winn’s hopes for Moth’s recovery do indeed manifest in the kind of miracle that could seem just about possible in the real world. Few readers would have believed the Winns if, on their travels, they claimed to have encountered the mythical Cornish sea monster known as the Morgawr, but a quiet story about the everyday struggles of ageing does not in itself seem far-fetched.

For me, the Walkers always claimed to have met Morgawr.

I think you’ve answered your own question with your next post: Authenticity. Following on from your epic post, the new revelations on the IG feed and the DM article have cleared this up for me. At some point in time it was suggested that Mum write another book, not like the previous one which was a bit too close to the knuckle but something else. It was obviously not possible for Sally Walker to offer any references or work history to a potential employer so what else could she do? She obviously thinks she can write, so it had to be another stab at that. I’m certain that the characters of Raynor and Moth were discussed at length and inspirations drawn from various characters in fiction and reality. Anyway, the monochrome photo of the two hands joined by the guide book with its pencilled notes is so contrived. You can really see this now. Everything spoken, written or photographed for an online article or glossy magazine has been worshipping that artificial naturalness. Their selfies and snaps from their walks and camps are completely different. The photo with the notes in the margin, the pages tied up with string… it’s all about piggybacking onto the homespun, trustworthy, made in a garden shed look. There was probably a Raynor Winn-core like cottagecore etc
Incidentally there’s a chapter in TWS called Trust. What a flipping joke!

@ThompsonTwin : Bladerunner is on BBC2 right now. The world is full of these little coincidences.

I just saw that Gillian Anderson is appearing in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf this autumn at Soho Place, with Marianne Elliott directing, so that relationship was clearly not damaged by the film adaptation of TSP. It’s clear from the interview that GA was the one who chased the rights and chose the producer and director, and she’s very complimentary about ME and her knowledgeable notes and way of working. As I can’t see that she’s ever worked with her before TSP, interesting that she is clearly retaining some good memories of the shoot.

Thanks to @DisappointedReader for starting a thread on 06/07/2025, with the interesting article below. Thanks to Our Chloe for her determination - what a charabanc journey:

The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

I went to the Duchy Nursery a few months ago and got a few bottles of Haye Farm cider, this is where Sal picked up a journalist from the train and took her to the café rather than home and Tim. It is still the 2023 vintage so I don't know if they will continue to make it? I will be toasting you all tonight with the one in the fridge, I do recommend it.

Haye Farm Cider

I no longer even believe that Beowulf was a book that he carried everywhere while travelling etc. Again, it’s just another romantic ideal to construct his image for the reader. The photoshoot was a prime example when the original copy would have been used. A book that’s been treasured throughout life and been a constant companion is in itself a work of art, more than a book.The character of Moth and his old, battered, well-loved and treasured companion are intertwined. If I was painting a portrait of him, I wouldn’t ask someone to pop out and buy a new copy for him to hold as a prop and neither would a photographer. Moth himself wouldn’t even consider it. It’s all staged and completely meaningless. Moth doesn’t exist. Tim is just a man who Sally put on a pedestal and became fiercely protective of. She tells us what he is like, his ability to charm women of all ages (she doesn’t mind the elderly ones but god help us if he cast his cap at someone younger). The things we learn about Moth, aside from his illness which is an extra layer in her writing, are packaged/marketed better with the addition of his copy of Beowulf. He’s a nice man, we can trust him, he’s intellectual, non materialistic, passionate and also humble. We can take him to our hearts and think how lucky Raynor is to be married to him. The reader isn’t jealous or envious of Raynor, but loves them both because they are a unit. The St Ives scenes in the book were one thing but seeing it played out on film made me uneasy because it didn’t ring true and I was avoiding my inner voice’s intervention and making excuses for them.

So much of the film made me uneasy...because it was even more obvious that the interactions she wrote about were unrealistic and contrived. The salted blackberries man, the girl from the cafe, Grant, the man/family looking at them in disgust upon Moth saying they were homeless, and so on. Even the ridiculous tent flooding scene. Nothing about it was convincing. Even if it were presented as fiction it would have remained terrible writing.

The bit of the St Ives scenes that always struck me as spectacularly weird is when TW goes back to their tent at the campsite (as it turns out, to pick up his handy travelling copy of Beowulf to wow the poetry-inclined crowds, in one of a long list of things that almost certainly never happened), SW panics totally that he won't come back because he's 'sick of her whingeing', that he'll pack up the tent and just head off by himself. Then she consoles herself with the realisation that he can't, not because he loves her, or because he's her devoted spouse, but because she has all the money on her!

And then (because a gull just ate her half of a shared Cornish pasty), she imagines mournfully, the time when TW will no longer be there:

What would happen when he didn’t come back, when he left me behind for good? I’d always be a half-eaten pasty, never whole again. 🙄

Even if TW's illness was real, I would have said an editor would be likely to say 'Are you sure you want to compare widowhood to being a half-eaten Cornish pasty?'

I'm sure I remember reading a piece that the journalist wrote, where she was expecting to go to Sal and Tim's home and talk to both of them but was unexpectedly taken to a cafe instead where she only had Sal to talk to. IIRC the tone of the piece was fairly neutral but the journalist did wonder if she hadn't been allowed to talk to Tim for some reason...

Am I making this up or did I read it? There is so much out there now that I'm not always certain if I am using firsthand or secondhand sources any more!

The bit where they're having a cream tea near the start and tell the family at the next table they're homeless always struck me as hilarious. I mean, those people were just sitting down for some food with their small children on holiday. It doesn't make them snobbish or in any way unpleasant to not be particularly enthused by a gabby stranger at a neighbouring table who is clearly about to launch into the story of his life at the slightest provocation any more than it would be to be less than thrilled by someone who started showing you their weird rash in a cafe!

No, I'm pretty sure I read that too. I think the implication was that TW was too ill to be talked to, and that SW was stoically not talking about it and protecting him from intrusive media exposure.

I think I remember another one where the journalist had also expected a face to face meeting with SW, but it ended up being on Skype/Teams because of Covid or TW being ill or something.

Phew, thank you. That is precisely what I thought I read - and we can't both be wrong, can we?

(Please tell me we can't).

Well, we could be in a Christopher Nolan film with a shared hallucination, I suppose...

Googling 'Raynor Winn interview Duchy Nurseries' seems to suggest it was published in the Times, but this is the same journalist reflecting on it in Grazia after the Observer story.

https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/in-the-news/i-interviewed-salt-path-author/

I too have been forced to reconsider Winn’s words anew. Two Julys ago I boarded a train for the small Cornish town of Lostwithiel, ahead of the release of her third book. It was a hot Friday afternoon when we met, Winn collecting me from the station and driving me up to the Duchy of Cornwall Nursery, where music and loud chatter abounded beneath the blooms.

The woman whose emotional turmoil had poured across her pages was far more reserved in person: the rawness I had expected from someone who had battled so much unbelievable misfortune was absent. As we spoke, I struggled to learn more about her life than had already been recounted in her books; Winn repeating some of the anecdotes I’d read. On leaving, I couldn’t help feeling our encounter had been somehow unsatisfying: that everything beyond what she had already written was somehow off-limits.

Moth’s illness was on my mind then, too. I had looked forward to meeting the man who had so spectacularly defied the odds of his disease (those with CBD typically live for six to eight years in a progressively deteriorating state; he had by then been diagnosed a decade earlier, and in each of the books undertook months-long walks that would test even the fittest among us).

But ahead of the interview, the location shifted from their home to a solo meeting with Winn elsewhere. The photoshoot also got postponed. Given the lows of his condition – the agony, bowel problems, memory slips and despair – and the apparent healing powers of their walks, I had mulled whether living out in the open had triggered a decline they were unwilling to share.

@YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree yes, absolutely, I just picked out the St Ives scene because it related to Beowulf. I agree with you, I think I might have shared my disappointments about the film when I first joined the charabanc. Yes, it looked and felt hammy in the screen and was totally the fault of Sally Walker’s deceitful writing which made it that way. Awkward silences, scenes which you don’t know are supposed to be funny or tragic probably because there was no tragedy so she was trying to be entertaining whilst still firmly a victim. Mark Wallington’s humour was stolen and put through a misery wash. All the preaching throughout the book and film about Cornwall’s past and present were another exploitative tactic because I haven’t seen any evidence that she gives a damn about any of that, but I’m happy to be proved wrong. @Oeufs oh yes… I’d forgotten that.. the half eaten pasty… Even if the reader is allowed to have a little laugh at one thing or another in her writing (rarely) you are instantly reminded that this is a sob story and don’t you dare forget it! That quote you’ve shared.. ugh… and the reality was no such thing!! She writes about emotions that she thinks she is supposed be feeling, as though she planted herself in Raynor’s shoes and thought about it that way. Her writing grabs the reader and wrings every drop of sympathy from them and also bludgeons anything left over, to death.

edit: thank you for sharing the above article.

Thank you @BrandiedAromatics for the reminder! 🍻❤️

@Oeufs That, I think, is the lady I am thinking of. I don't know which interview I read, I seem to remember her being picked up and driven by Sal in a rattly old car and being stonewalled whenever she asked where Tim was.

Yes. Hindsight is such a wonderful thing! The rattly old car was probably a prop as well. Of course Tim didn’t want to be present and I’d love to have overheard their conversations regarding these interviews! 😀 Tim, when it dawned on him that he’d actually have to be a dying Moth! It’s like a Greek tragedy or something. Healthy, handsome guy, life and soul of the party has been shackled by his loving wife’s presentation of him in her bestselling book and has to hide away lest he breaks out of character or gets a modelling contract for Finisterre. Awkward questions about CBD and whether or not doctors have asked to monitor or study him for progress. After a while even “twinkling” is going to wear thin.

That sounds like the original interview. I think someone must have cut and pasted it on here many threads ago, as I've never had a Times sub.

SW does stonewalling very well, as we know, when she's confronted with stealing from family, or live on stage at a literary festival when a friendly interviewer presses her on what Moth's real name is -- she relies on an interviewer in a literary context generally not wanting to make a woman they perceive as a stoical survivor of traumas uncomfortable, or push her for painful details of the eviction or TW's decline.

And that journalist, looking back on an 'unsatisfactory' interview, puts her finger exactly on what we've often said here, SW's refusal to deviate from a script, and her insistence on retelling the same anecdotes over and over. The Mars bar, the moment of illumination under the stairs etc etc.

It's also of course significant that the journalist finds 'kind' explanations for her stonewalling and repetitive script, and the shift of the interview away from their home, plus the absence of Moth. She thinks they all come from a protective impulse towards TW's privacy.

gets a modelling contract for Finisterre😀😀