What is The Salt Path and the story surrounding it?
It was later turned into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.
Winn has recently described enduring some of the 'hardest days' of her life, after claims that parts of it were fabricated.
The Salt Path is a 2018 memoir, nature, and travel book written by Raynor Winn.
It tells the story of the long-distance walk she and her husband Moth took along the South West Coast Path, in South West England.
The pair had lost their home and Moth was reportedly diagnosed with fatal corticobasal degeneration (CBD).
Throughout the story, the couple is almost penniless, receiving little money in tax credits each week and camping each night.
The story ends on the last day, after walking the whole path in two sections, in two successive summers, when the couple meets a stranger who offers them the tenancy of a flat.
In 2023, a film adaptation began production, with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles.
It premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in the UK in May 2025.
An investigation by The Observer newspaper, however, has reported that Winn may have misrepresented the events that led to the couple losing their home and that experts had doubts over Moth having corticobasal degeneration (CBD).
The publisher, which also said the couple's legal names are Sally and Timothy Walker, said the couple lost their home after an accusation that Winn had stolen thousands of pounds from her employer, rather than a bad business investment.
It also said that it had spoken to medical experts who were sceptical about Moth having CBD, given his lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them.
Gillian Anderson attends the CineMerit Award for #GillianAnderson and the Premiere of the movie "The Salt Path" during the 2025 Munich Film Festival at Deutsches Theater in Munich, Germany.
More #GettyVideo #MunichFilmFest 🎥 Andreas Rentz 👉 https://t.co/MQixIYLrNg pic.twitter.com/GcxiZ69tAO
Penguin, which published the book, said it 'undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence', including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read.
It added: 'Prior to the Observer enquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book's content.'
In a statement on her website, she hit back at the Observer's article, saying it was 'grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life'.
She added: 'The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south west.
'It's not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope.
'The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.'
A post shared by Raynor Winn (@raynor.winn)
On Wednesday (July 9), Winn also posted clinic letters on Instagram addressed to Timothy Walker, which she said showed that 'he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years'.
She wrote: 'The last few days have been some of the hardest of my life. Heartbreaking accusations that Moth has made up his illness have been made, leaving us devastated.'
In a statement on Friday (July 11), Penguin Michael Joseph, which published The Salt Path in 2018, said Winn's next book will now be delayed.
On Winter Hill was due to be published in October, but has been pushed back following the "intrusive conjecture".
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A spokeswoman for the publisher said: 'Given recent events, in particular intrusive conjecture around Moth's health condition, which has caused considerable distress to Raynor Winn and her family, it is our priority to support the author at this time.
'With this in mind, Penguin Michael Joseph, together with the author, has made the decision to delay the publication of On Winter Hill from this October.
'We will announce a new publication date in due course.'
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New Statesman
2 days ago
- New Statesman
The Salt Path and the sins of memoir
Photo by Steve Tanner/Black Bear It is not, to put it mildly, a good look. At a time when household finances are stretched and the government is cutting benefits for the sick and disabled, author Raynor Winn stands accused of exaggerating her husband's illness and misrepresenting the circumstances of their destitution in her 2019 memoir The Salt Path – and getting rich via book sales and film rights in the process. Cue fury from betrayed readers (and, undoubtedly, a few jealous writers) on X, and a spate of solemn op-eds on the line between fact and fiction. As the author of a memoir myself, I admit the story left me unscandalised. Yes, the allegations, if accurate, make a mockery of The Salt Path's claim to be nonfiction. But to tell you the truth – and would I, dear reader, do anything else? – I've come to have low expectations of the average memoir. The genre defined by fidelity to the facts is, on average, a poor guide to deeper truths about human beings. If you want to understand people, you're better off reading fiction. To be sure, few books beat a brilliant memoir. The best – Primo Levi's Auschwitz testimony If This Is a Man, James Baldwin's searing race chronicle Notes of a Native Son, Annie Ernaux's spare sociological masterpieces – combine the artistry of a great novel with the electric frisson of self-exposure. But for every thrilling confession by a Thomas De Quincey or a Tove Ditlevsen, there are countless frauds and duds. Naturally, the frauds get the headlines. Winn joins a long and ignoble list of autobiographers accused of deception. The canonical modern example is James Frey, unmasked on Oprah after fabricating parts of his addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces (and recently profiled by the New York Times, unrepentantly recalling the scandal from a house full of Matisses and Picassos bought with his royalties). Before Frey came Binjamin Wilkormiski, author of a feted Holocaust memoir who turned out to be neither a survivor nor Jewish. Wilkormiski was defended by fellow 'survivor' Laura Grabowski, who swore she remembered him from Birkenau – until it transpired she was in fact Laurel Wilson, author of her own hoax memoir of ritual abuse, Satan's Underground. But frauds are much rarer than duds. Since the 'memoir boom' of the late Eighties and Nineties – led by superb originals like Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes – the demand for truly revelatory personal narrative has outstripped supply. A deluge of mediocrity has filled the gap. The journalist Will Storr recently detailed how AI has already perfected the bland tone and nebulous detail that makes for a viral Substack confessional. So much for the hope – floated by David Shields in his manifesto Reality Hunger – that autobiography might offer an answer to the artifice of modern life. Of course, in all literary forms the dross outweighs the gold. But the paradox of memoir is that the form premised on truth is usually so poor at delivering it. That's because we are, on the whole, thoroughly unreliable narrators of our own lives. One problem lies with the fallibility of memory. It isn't just that we repress unbearable truths, as Freud taught. Psychologists have shown how memory is itself a storyteller, weaving together experience, imagination, beliefs and memories of memories into a plausible version of what might have happened – and then selling it to us as the truth. Even if memory were trustworthy, a host of factors militate against truthful autobiography. The story of your life is the story of your most important relationships. And a good story, as every creative writing teacher knows, requires conflict and moral nuance. To tell your life story, you have to reveal unflattering things about the people you love: parents, lovers, siblings. Few have the stomach for that. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Nor are most people willing to write unflatteringly about themselves. When I tell people I've written a memoir, they sometimes tell me about some episode from their own life they'd like to write about. These stories are often fascinating – but not always for the reasons their tellers think. Often the most interesting parts are the ones they're unwilling or unable to see. People want to tell their life story with all the moral and psychological nuance stripped out, leaving them as virtuous victims or heroic survivors (or, seemingly in Winn's case, both). All good memoirs find solutions to these problems. A certain ruthlessness with the feelings of others can help: I admire the cold honesty of Rachel Cusk's memoir of motherhood A Life's Work, even as I wince for her children. Some depend on a kind of masochistic self-exposure: see Karl Ove Knausgaard. Another solution is to be French. Their less censorious literary culture than ours licences greater self-disclosure, producing the Nobel-winning Ernaux as well as the undeniably narcissistic but peerless Emmanuel Carrère. It can help if you've already cut ties with family members before you write about them. One reason many classic memoirs – like Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? – are about escaping religious upbringings is that their authors are relatively free from the usual ties of filial loyalty. Or you can wait until the people you're writing about are dead, as Edmund Gosse did before writing his immortal account of childhood Father and Son. Some of my favourite memoirs find creative formal ways of engaging with the slipperiness of self-narration. In Night of the Gun David Carr applies the methods of investigative journalism to reconstruct his own past as a crack addict. Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir is a stunning Nabokovian experiment that recounts the author's struggle with a rare variant of epilepsy characterised by compulsive fabulism. But successful memoirs are exceptions. We're much better at seeing through other people's hypocrisies and contradictions than our own. That insight underpins the narrative revolution pioneered by Jane Austen: the blending of a character's innocent perspective with the author's more knowing one. If Elizabeth Bennett had written her own story, it would be a banal tissue of vanity and delusion. But when Austen told it, she invented 'free indirect speech' – and the modern novel. The messy truth behind the Salt Path may well turn out to be neither Winn's inspiring redemption story nor the cynical fraud imagined by her online critics. Perhaps it's something more interesting: a case of two people backed into a corner by bad luck and terrible decisions, who stumbled onto a slightly too perfect escape – and found themselves trapped in their own distortions once it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Whatever actually happened, it would make a gripping story. Just don't expect Raynor Winn to be the person to tell it. [See also: The Salt Path is Scientology for the middle classes] Related
BBC News
2 days ago
- BBC News
The Salt Path: 'Trusting Raynor Winn was our biggest mistake'
A family who claim The Salt Path author Raynor Winn stole tens of thousands of pounds from their business say trusting her was their "biggest mistake".Ros Hemmings and her daughter Debbie, from Pwllheli in Gwynedd, allege Ms Winn - who worked for their property business in the early 2000s - stole around £64, comes after an investigation by The Observer contained claims Ms Winn gave misleading information about her life story in her book The Salt Path, which has been made into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Winn has called The Observer report "highly misleading" and disputed many of its claims. The 2018 book The Salt Path, and its recent film adaptation, tells the story of a couple who decide to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path after their home was repossessed following a bad business The Observer claimed Ms Winn - whose legal name is Sally Walker - and her husband, Moth Winn, had lost their home after she took out a loan to repay money she had been accused of stealing from her previous employer, Martin a statement issued earlier in July, Ms Winn stood by the book's description of how they came to lose their house saying the dispute with the Hemmings did not result in her and her husband losing their home. Martin Hemmings, who died in 2012, was an estate agent and property surveyor from north Wales, and husband to Ros Hemmings, 74, became friends with Mr Winn when they worked at the same National Trust site in the 1990s."I got on extremely well with him," said Mrs Hemmings. "He seemed a really nice person."Then in 2001, Mr Winn mentioned his wife had lost her job at a hotel as a bookkeeper."It coincided with my husband's bookkeeper retiring so I suggested her to my husband," said Mrs Hemmings."She came for an interview, and she was the one. She seemed very efficient, we liked her."But she said after that her husband noticed a change in the business."Within a year or so we weren't making any money," said Mrs Hemmings. Initially they did not suspect anything."I did not think there was any reason for this aside from the fact that Martin was rubbish at sending out bills," said Mrs their daughter Debbie, who was aged around 29 at the time, became emotional as she remembered receiving a distressed call from her father as the financial pressure built over a number of years."He said: 'I just don't know what's gone wrong, I'm working every hour God gives me and there's no money,'" said Debbie Adams, now aged 46."About five days after that first call he rings up and goes, she [Winn] has been nicking money. I was like, 'dad come on now, no. Surely there's something gone wrong?' He said 'no, we've had a look and there's money missing'."They claimed a meeting between Mr Hemmings and the bank manager showed £6,000 to £9,000 was missing. They said Mr Hemmings then went straight to the police and a local solicitor. They said shortly afterwards, Ms Winn visited them at their home."She was crying," said Mrs Hemmings. "She had brought a cheque I think it was for £9,000. She said this is all the money I have, I've had to sell some of my mother's things to do this, can we call it quits?"Mrs Hemmings said her husband took the money on the advice of the police who said: "It may be all you get."But they also advised the couple to start going back through the accounts to check if anything else was said they went back through years of the business's financial paperwork."It was a very upsetting thing to do and it took us weeks and weeks," said Mrs Hemmings. "But we found she had taken about £64,000."Mrs Hemmings said a few weeks later they received a letter from a solicitor in London offering to pay the money back and legal fees which came to around £90, included an agreement not to pursue criminal charges which Mr Hemmings Hemmings said: "He was keen to do it in a way, we had no money and had nearly been basically bankrupt. She also had young children, and to have a mother in prison or facing a criminal charge, he didn't want that to happen." In a statement released in July after the Observer article, which included allegations from Mrs Hemmings, Ms Winn acknowledged making "mistakes" earlier in her said it had been a pressured time, and although she was questioned by police, she was not charged."Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry," she Winn said the case had been settled between her and her ex-employer on a "non-admissions basis", because she "did not have the evidence required to support what happened".She said: "Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was."BBC Wales put Ms Winn's statement to Mrs responded: "I think she's just trying to put the best spin on the question."The mistake was that we ever employed her, and the biggest mistake my husband made, because obviously I'd recommended her in a way, was that he trusted her."The Salt Path has sold more than two million copies since its publication, and Ms Winn has written two sequels, The Wild Silence and Landlines, which also focus on themes of nature, wild camping, homelessness and Hemmings said she had not read The Salt Path because she did not feel it would reflect her view on why the couple did the added: "I'd have stamped on the book I think. Just to gloss over why they ran out of money to me was shocking."Her daughter Debbie said: "I don't wish ill of them. I just wish that they would tell the truth, and the truth needs to be told." In her statement in July, Ms Winn said: "The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south west."It's not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope."Ros and Debbie said they had no paperwork or contract from the time to back up their claims - although others, like their solicitor involved in the case, Michael Strain, have corroborated their claims as part of The Observer's Hemmings said she was speaking out now to give "a voice" to her late husband."I can't forgive her for sort of destroying my husband's confidence in people, because it did," she said."And I think that's partly why we didn't talk about it. He was so embarrassed that this had happened to his business."North Wales Police said they were unable to confirm or deny any details regarding Ms approached for comment, Ms Winn's spokesman referred BBC News to the statement Ms Winn made on 9 added: "She is very grateful for all the kind messages of support she has received from readers."
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Telegraph
Coastal charity may cut ties with Salt Path author
A charity that champions the 630-mile coastal trail at the heart of The Salt Path book may cut ties with its author following concerns about its accuracy. Raynor Winn, the best-selling author, has served as an ambassador for the South West Coast Path Association (SWCPA) since 2020, but the group is now understood to reviewing its ambassadors programme amid controversy about her memoir. In the book, Winn recounts walking the South West Coast Path with her terminally ill husband, Moth, after the pair lost their home. The 'unflinchingly honest' account was adapted into a film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, but its accuracy has been thrown into doubt by allegations that Winn lost the property after stealing money from her employer. The SWCPA enlisted Winn to help promote the coastal walk, which stretches around the South West peninsula from Minehead in Somerset to Poole in Dorset. Several pages on the charity's website featuring Winn have been deleted, including a lengthy interview with the author in which she said: 'I was incredibly honoured when the South West Coast Path Association approached me to be an ambassador because, as I've said, that path has meant so much to me. 'It's been such a pivotal, changing point in my life, and I carry something of that coast path with me wherever I go.' A 'Meet Our Ambassadors' page has also been deleted. Winn has been contacted for comment. Author 'deeply regrets mistakes' The SWCPA's review comes following allegations that Winn lost her home after taking out a sizeable loan that she was unable to repay. She borrowed the money to settle and avoid criminal charges after stealing money from her employer, it has been alleged. The claim is in contrast to the account given in The Salt Path, published by Penguin, which attributes the loss of the property to a poor investment in a friend's business. Winn responded to the allegations, first made in The Observer newspaper, by stating that she 'deeply regrets' certain 'mistakes' in her past. The Salt Path states that the couple travelled the South West Coast Path while homeless and that they lived in a tent with meagre supplies. However, it has emerged that the pair owned a house in France at the time of their 2012 trek. Winn has since claimed it was too dilapidated to live in. The Observer investigation also raised doubts about Moth Winn's diagnosis for corticobasal degeneration (CBD). The degenerative disease causes difficulties with movement, speech, memory and swallowing, with symptoms worsening as it progresses. Those with CBD have a typical life expectancy of six to eight years following the first onset of symptoms. Moth, who was said to have been diagnosed in 2013, managed to go on lengthy hikes recounted in Winn's books. She responded to questions over her husband's diagnosis by saying that they were 'heartbreaking'. Winn also shared sharing medical documents which she claimed proved that Moth had been diagnosed and treated for the disease. PSPA, a leading CBD charity, cut ties with the Winns following The Observer's investigation. The couple had previously worked with the charity to help it raise funds.
