4 days ago
Salt Path author gave false details as ‘it all seemed too complicated'
The author of The Salt Path admitted to giving a false date for an encounter with a couple on the coastal trail in an email written seven years ago, it has been claimed.
The couple, who met Raynor Winn and her husband Moth in a Cornish cafe, are the latest to raise questions about apparent discrepancies in her best-selling memoir.
Winn described in the book how they walked the 630-mile South Coast Path in 2013 after their home was repossessed, and Moth was diagnosed with a degenerative disease.
But when Australian couple Joanne and David Parsons recognised themselves in the author's account of meeting two walkers in the Fat Apples Cafe, near Porthallow, they noticed the dates did not add up because that encounter happened in 2015, the Observer reports.
And after they confronted Winn via email in 2018, the newspaper says, she admitted that she claimed their encounter took place two years earlier than it did because 'it all just seemed too complicated'.
The Observer first revealed discrepancies in the story told in The Salt Path last month after the book was adapted into a film starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson.
'They never said they were homeless'
The inconsistencies highlighted included the loss of the couple's home, which has since been linked to legal troubles following the alleged embezzlement of money by Winn from a former employer.
Mr and Mrs Parsons, who documented their own walk of the South Coast Path in a blog, told The Observer that they had met Winn and Moth, whose real names are Sally and Tim Walker, in the cafe in 2015.
The Australian couple were also unhappy about how they had been portrayed in the book as well-off people who did not camp once the weather had worsened. In reality, they had been forced to sell their house when a back injury left David, a bricklayer from Perth, unable to work.
They also said that Winn and her husband never mentioned they were homeless.
The Observer reports that Mrs Parsons wrote an email to Winn and told her: 'When we saw the picture of you both in the article, we kept looking at each other saying, 'That's Sally and Tim!' But it can't be as you would have told us you were homeless and you said you were walking the other way [in the opposite direction to the one they actually walked].
'And why did you give yourselves false names? Or did you reinvent yourselves while on the path? Would love to know.'
Mrs Parsons also questioned why Winn claimed she and her husband had given up camping and were only staying in hotels after donating their tent to a charity shop.
'[We] do not know where the bit about ditching the tent at a charity shop came from,' wrote Mrs Parsons. 'We worked out we were happier wild camping and only went to B&Bs when the weather was really bad.'
Winn wrote back a few days later to clarify the discrepancy in the dates, The Observer reported.
'We went back to the path' author claimed
She claimed she and Moth had walked the coast path in 2013, as documented in The Salt Path, but walked part of the coast again in 2015. 'That's when we met you,' she wrote in her reply.
Winn then admitted she had presented the meeting as having happened in 2013. 'We didn't explain any of that [in the book], as it all just seemed too complicated,' she said. She also apologised for misremembering the details about the tent.
The Telegraph contacted representatives for Winn for comment.
In a previous statement, the author said: 'The Salt Path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared, an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey.'
