The Salt Path: did truth get lost on the way?

In a red-carpet interview in May, Raynor Winn, the best-selling author of The Salt Path, looked around her with an awe-struck expression. There she was at the premiere of a major film adaptation of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. She was moved to describe her success as ‘impossible to believe’.

Many might now be thinking the same of The Salt Path itself, which has sold more than two million copies since it was published in 2018. That’s because an investigation by the Observer has cast doubt on the accuracy and truthfulness of The Salt Path – a memoir of her and her husband’s unlikely triumph over homelessness and his struggles with brain disease, as they hike along England’s rugged south coast.

Indeed, the Observer investigation calls into question the two key events that underpin The Salt Path – the Winns’ loss of their Welsh home because of a scheming friend, and her husband’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). It also reveals that neither is she called Raynor Winn nor is her husband called Moth Winn. They are in fact Sally and Tim Walker.

It’s perhaps easy to see why publishers wanted to believe The Salt Path, given the remarkable story it tells. It begins with the Winns being dispossessed of their 17th-century farmhouse in northern Wales, after an old friend called ‘Cooper’ wheedled the couple into investing large sums of money into a business that subsequently went bust. Their misery was compounded by Moth’s CBD diagnosis a short time later. And so, finding themselves homeless, destitute and with little time left with one another, they embark on a 630-mile journey along England’s southern coastline. Sleeping in a tent, lashed by wind and rain and left to depend on the generosity of others, the Winns discover what ‘really matters’ in life. The book sold itself: a tale of grit and community spirit overcoming evil and misfortune, set amid the haunting landscapes of Devon, Cornwall and Dorset.

Yet the Observer paints a very different picture of events. It alleges that Raynor and Moth Winn aka the Walkers lost their Welsh home not because of their naïve generosity towards a duplicitous friend, but because Raynor had embezzled close to £70,000 from a small family business where she worked part-time as a bookkeeper. A relative of hers allegedly agreed to loan the money needed to repay what had been stolen. The couple secured the loan through their house, which they lost in court when the relative was pursued by creditors because of his own bankruptcy.

The Observer also claims that they were never ‘homeless’. It alleges that the Walkers actually own a property in rural France, which is now ‘uninhabitable’.

The Observer also casts doubt on Moth’s CBD diagnosis. Sufferers of this irreversible and untreatable disease typically have a few years to live – a decade in the most fortunate cases. They also experience severe physical symptoms, including tremors. Yet The Salt Path claims that Moth was diagnosed with CBD 15 years ago, and he is seemingly unaffected by any visible symptoms.

Raynor has published a lengthy rebuttal, of sorts, on her website. She insists the Observer article was ‘grossly unfair’ and denies her husband have lied about his illness. ‘The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility’, she said. ‘And I can’t allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories.’

Some are clearly not convinced. The country’s biggest CBD charity, the Progressive Supranuclear Palsy Association, has ended its relationship with the Winns and cancelled engagements.

There are striking parallels between the allegations made against the Winns over The Salt Path and the story of Belle Gibson, the Australian ‘cancer’ patient who made millions after she claimed to have cured herself through homeopathic remedies. Gibson told her legion of online followers that she had eradicated her stage four blastoma – the most aggressive kind of brain tumour – as well as a slew of different cancers just by drinking various juices and eating organic food. Like the Winns, Gibson had a lucrative book deal with Penguin. The extent of Gibson’s lies – she had never had cancer, and had an easily traceable history of fabulism – was eventually exposed by Australian journalist Richard Guilliatt in 2015. If the allegations against the Winns do prove true, publishers Penguin will once again have serious questions to answer.

It’s difficult not to be sceptical, with or without the Observer investigation. After all, we know that a walk on England’s south-west coast cannot cure brain disease. Yet the Winns appear determined to give the impression that it can. Incredibly, Raynor’s third book, Landlines, includes a passage about how one of her husband’s recent brain scans showed ‘a distinct reduction in his receptor cells’. And the film of The Salt Path shows Moth triumphantly holding their tent in the air on Cornish coastline, a supposedly moving display of physical strength after not being able to feel his hands and feet at the beginning of the trek.

There’s no denying The Salt Path tells a feel-good story. But does it tell a true story? Does it potentially offer false hope to those who suffer from conditions similar to that endured by Winn? It really shouldn’t have taken a high-profile exposé for these questions to be asked.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.