‘I Interviewed The Salt Path Author – I've Been Forced To Reconsider What She Told Me'

Graziadaily

4 days ago

It was the ultimate tale of triumph over adversity: the mother who, homeless and with a seriously ill husband in tow, undertook a 630-mile walk and became a national sensation. Raynor Winn's 2018 memoir The Salt Path became a book club hit, shifting over 2million copies, and in May becoming a Hollywood film starring Gillian Anderson (opposite Jason Isaacs as the author's other half, Moth).
But cracks have begun to emerge in this 'unflinchingly honest' epic. An investigation by the Observer earlier this month found that the Winns are in fact Sally and Tim Walker; that she was questioned by police after allegedly embezzling £64,000 from a former boss, and that the circumstances in which the pair lost their home - which they had always maintained was the result of a bad business deal with a friend – were not as they had depicted. Rather than being homeless, the report found, they have owned a property near Bordeaux since 2007.
Winn – or Walker – has denied many of the claims, describing the investigation as 'grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life.' The most heartbreaking, she added, was 'the suggestion that Moth made up his illness' (each of her three bestsellers charts his battle with corticobasal degeneration or CBD, a fatal neurological condition).
The fallout has been unabating. The pair has been dropped by the CBD charity they fundraised for and lambasted by the owner of a cider farm they were invited to live on after he read The Salt Path, who says he feels 'gaslit.' The release of On Winter Hill – Winn's fourth book, due out this autumn – is on ice; her live tour dates with a local folk group cancelled.
The eye-watering allegations currently engulfing the couple have hit fans hard. Social media is awash with the devastation of those who bought into this seemingly authentic story and now feel duped; who uprooted their lives inspired by the Winns' travels, and who turned two unlikely then 50-somethings into a major success, possibly under false pretences.
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.
Yet the images that did eventually get taken showed him looking well; ditto those taken alongside Isaacs around the time of the film's release, where he appeared more dashing, perhaps, than the Hollywood actor enlisted to play him.
On this, and much else, I have been asked the same question over and over since the scandal broke: did I speculate then that something might be amiss? To which the answer is, plainly, no. Medical miracles, though rare, do happen. Some people aren't born raconteurs; interview locations change. While I understand the anger that so many are now grappling with, I also feel for the Winns – that their story, which remains entirely real to them, has been so publicly pulled apart.
Their publisher is sticking by them, for now. Whether readers can ever really trust Winn again is another story entirely.