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?

I remember their cousin saying how the son and daughter always had designer clothes. Their parents drove luxury cars. If they examined this they would see their good life was financed illicitly from the Hemmings and both sets of grandparents. I would find that quite a burden to carry.

Yes of course, you’re absolutely right @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree that is her style of writing and is another example of the difference between Raynor Winn the character and Sally Walker the writer i.e if things had ever been as bad as the catastrophe on the page then you’d wonder why decisions weren’t made that would actually help the situation. Of course, that doesn’t make a good story does it?
Agreed @AgitatedGoose that information also makes a mockery of any “nervous breakdown” type claims. In my experience, when people are always catastrophising their experiences for dramatic effect, they’re very unlikely to even know what the reality is or how it affects a person. It trivialises genuine sufferers, again. Yes, I agree too @Oeufs what can you expect?
I still don’t understand the house raffle thing, especially when it was a complete lie about being debt free. What on earth were they thinking? Then the decision to just write a book and sell each copy for a pound in the hopes that they could sell enough to pay back that debt and not actually have any winners anyway… but to actually sit down and take the time to write a book when you’ve done all those “mistakes” leading up to it, is insane. This has just been brushed away in the rebuttal as being of no consequence but minor mishaps are exaggerated and blown to epic proportions. Moth with a couple of months to live etc.

Surely someone as sensible as Raynor’s daughter Rowan, would ask the question, “Mum, are you sure this is a good idea?”

This has made me realise the impetus to get Sally walking again! Living the life ..😎

Re the story of the chicken shop roof falling down, could it have been inspired by Chicken Licken?

@Peladon that made me laugh! Yes indeed. I would go so far as to say the whole three books owe a great deal to Chicken Licken. Unfortunately the readers appear to have been all those poor saps Goosey Loosey, Cocky Locke et al who followed him straight into the foxes’ den and became the Walkers’ Sunday roast.

Yes. And something doesn't sit well with me about Alice's recent post on her tattoo IG account about her having a nervous breakdown and her whole body and mind shutting down and not enjoying sharing her personal life. Because none of this is reflected in her other personal IG account (that a charabancer says has now been set to private, while oddly her tattoo one has just been made public again...controlling the narrative for sympathy ring any bells???)

For example, in her personal IG she wrote in January, as reported in the recent DM piece: "Plan for the year is to ride bikes, surf loads, hang out with dogs and be hot. Much of the same then really". Meanwhile she was at a luxury hotel spa in Feb. She took a bike trip in the USA on her Harley in Sept 2025, and went on holiday to Spain post scandal and was at Download Festival last month. While none of these things are indicative of not suffering a mental health crisis, they at least suggest she was capable of having a good time and socialising with friends, which is at odds with what i understand about severe mental breakdown. And there is no mention of this on her personal IG. So yeah, just got my inconsistency radar beeping.

Those are great points @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree - thanks for the reminder. I saw those posts too - the aim of “being hot” and travelling and Download - a different narrative entirely.

Yeah, and a narrative that is now closed from view apart from to her existing followers.

Another thing i meant to say as well...i found it quite striking that her trauma post was essentially to say "i'm back". Uncanny similiarity to the recent RW boot lacing post of also being "back". Certainly adds to the idea that Alice could be advising, if not running, RW's social media narrative.

Her look, "and be hot", and the photo in front of the Harley gives me her dad vibes .....

Yes@YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree : and one of the other things that gives weight to Alice running Sal’s IG is her own confession (in the link below) that she finds it hard to keep momentum going: she’ll have quite a few ideas and then they dry up so it’s a bit stop-start. Well that’s what we’re seeing on Sal’s IG: two posts close together then nothing.

www.facebook.com/share/r/1MURxuhok4/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Wow! Thank you for sharing this content with us! The nerve of these people. “Inconsistency radar beeping” yes indeed. Thank you @YourMoneyforFrothingandYourChipsforFree I’ll continue to take everything they offer up in public with the usual vast quantities of salt, no sympathy here, no more Fs given.

Either they have examined it and don’t care or in similar fashion to the parents have justified it. The parents have a habit of justifying things to themselves and making up stories to cover up the truth. Instead of distancing herself from her parents, she’s supporting and encouraging, which I find strange.

Edit, my quoted section has disappeared. I was replying to a post on the previous page and can’t remember whose it was!
edit again, replying to @BrandiedAromatics

@HatStickBoots Either they have examined it and don’t care or in similar fashion to the parents have justified it. The parents have a habit of justifying things to themselves and making up stories to cover up the truth. Instead of distancing herself from her parents, she’s supporting and encouraging, which I find strange.

Just to round it all up! Yes, and I was responding to @Anythingbutheadlands if only there could be an open and honest acknowledgement of what has happened and their part in it.

I sometimes reflect on how I wish I had been able to give more to my late grandparents but I was still trying to establish myself. I feel this team denial serves to cement their interlocked state*. But, depending on your make up, It could have a detrimental health consequence.

*For those interested in the symbols : the four hares, carved in stone, feature in Notre Dame cathedral, Lyons.

There's a good entry on "three hares" in Wikipedia (but I couldn't get the link to work).

Grifters gotta grift. I have to say I cannot believe there are so many threads and people are so invested in this pair and their various hangers on. Why give any of them the oxygen of publicity?

Fair enough question ... and has been considered by the investigative journalist, Chloe Hadjimatheou, who exposed the pair. The fact is the perpetrators of the scam are currently gasping for more oxygen - no remorse, no apologies - and have said that it is business as usual to them.

I imagine the lifestyle the children benefit from is more appealing to keep rather than lose it by disowning or distancing themselves from them. While I am sure both are capable of earning a crust, one does wonder about the Harley, a £1500 camera, living in a huge house (likely rent & bill free), regular trips abroad, the overheads of a freelance tattoo business (which she admits has been on hold for several months), owning a dog. Meanwhile the son apparently operates a drone filming business (but hasn't promoted it on IG for months) and he bought a house recently that he is renovating. The question is: is all that self-funded or is it made possible via the ill gotten gains? IMO it is no wonder they have stuck with their parents, esp as they knew how the "truth" had been rehashed in the books from the get go. They have lived with that knowledge for a decade!

Well, @Fast800goingforit, there's no 'publicity' in an obscure Mn thread. I'm 'invested' because the actual messy, criminal, fraudulent backstory to a massive bestseller that relied for its appeal on the author and her husband being adorable, trusting types who blamelessly lost their home and business because they trusted in a childhood friend in the same week as the adorable husband got a terminal diagnosis, is terribly interesting.

Also, the journalist who investigated the story acknowledges that she got several of her leads from the 'citizen journalism' done on these threads.

The book was an implicit rebuke to those who would have chosen the 'sensible' option of council homeless accommodation, staying close to medical help, and getting a job over the 'brave and eccentric' decision to face homelessness and death by walking a famously difficult 630-mile coastal path and finding solace in nature while living in a tent on fresh air and small change.

Except it turns out that not only did they not walk the path, they were never homeless, Tim Walker was never diagnosed with a terminal illness, they lost their house because it was collateral against a loan given by a family member to buy the silence of the former employer Sally Walker had embezzled large sums from and get her out of a likely prison sentence, and that the period they are supposed to have spent on the path was in fact spent being housed by a family member, lying low from their creditors, living on benefits, and refusing to get jobs or help out on her farm when she was struggling.

Not only are they not the sweet, unworldly types TSP presents them as, they're ultra-materialists who stole, not only from SW's employer but also from her elderly mother and his parents, to feed their appetite for luxury cars and designer clothes, while using TW's supposed ill health as an excuse to avoid the consequences. And they didn't take the money and run. The scam was continued in another two books and a film adaptation. There's never been any acknowledgement of the lies or health scam, just fury at 'haters' being mean to them.

That's why it's interesting. It's not like the Little House on the Prairie books where Laura Ingalls Wilder rearranged real life events for a child reader so as not to confront them with infant death or her father's frequent skipping out of town with unpaid deaths, or some of the scuzzier details of frontier life. This is more like Padre Pio being discovered faking his own stigmata with carbolic acid and a nail.

I agree with the points that @BrandiedAromatics and @Oeufs, have made in their responses. You have to remember @Fast800goingforit that an awful lot of people were fully invested in this couple, the fall out from a con of this scale does tend to go on for a while, possibly even years, especially when the perpetrators seem keen to continue with the grift.

Adding to @Oeufs and @BrandiedAromatics excellent posts:
The grift is being continued with the pair of them trying to pretend that Tim and Sally don’t even exist any more. Sally is so deluded that she thinks she can project that she has always been Raynor Winn. She was in full cosplay when invited to join the folk band Gigspanner. They dropped her as soon as they found out the truth.
This couple have never been taken to court or formally accused of fraud. They could have just set up a “go fund me” page for “Moth” to pay for his palliative care, but that would very definitely have been seen as criminal by now as Tim Walker has been noted to be in excellent health, having been able to miraculously reverse his symptoms. He has never wanted to be studied or examined for the benefit of others however and there have been no teams of doctors or scientists clamouring to ask. It’s almost as though everyone knows it’s not true. Sally, sorry “Raynor” sticks to her script and says that she only ever wrote about what worked for Moth…. So he’s obviously very special. Oh the part at the beginning of TSP when they were apparently turned down for emergency housing because Moth wasn’t sick enough….. funny that, eh? Who’da thought. They very cleverly created TSP and earned money legitimately despite the content being what it is and are eager to pretend that Tim and Sally Walker don’t exist.