When The Sunday Times of London compiled its list of Britain’s best-selling books of the past 50 years, Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path came in at No. 37. A sensation upon its release, in 2018, it centered on her and Moth, her terminally ill husband, becoming homeless and then setting out on a 630-mile coastal trek. It sold more than two million copies. The book meant so much to so many that this year’s film adaptation, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, always felt inevitable.
However, according to a brutal takedown by The Observer, The Salt Path is actually a hive of untruths, half-truths, and embellishments designed to obscure a far darker reality. Raynor Winn is actually Sally Walker, a woman who lost her house after being caught allegedly stealing tens of thousands of dollars from her employer. Her claims of homelessness neglected to mention a second property she owned in France. The general medical consensus is that anyone with her husband’s condition should have died a decade ago.
If you believe the investigation, The Salt Path starts to look like the most extraordinary grift. Not for nothing has the Internet decided that it should be re-published as The Pinch of Salt Path.
The appeal of the book was always down to its sense of stoic Britishness. Hit by several successive disasters, the Winns pulled themselves together, stiffened their upper lips, and walked the 630-mile sea-lashed South West Coast Path. They carried all their possessions on their backs. They encountered prejudice and kindness in equal measure.
By the end of it, the couple had not only experienced a spiritual awakening of sorts, but the symptoms of Moth’s rare and irreversible neurological condition had started to recede. It had adversity. It had triumph. It had lungfuls of clean Atlantic air. It was proof to millions that, no matter what, all trials are surmountable.
And yet, little by little, the investigation undid almost all of this. Ros Hemmings was interviewed and claimed that Winn (then Walker) had previously worked as a bookkeeper for her late husband. When, in 2008, her husband discovered that Walker had skimmed around $85,000 from company accounts over the years, he called the police. Walker was arrested and taken in for questioning. However, the Hemmingses agreed not to press criminal charges if Walker repaid all the missing money. The Walkers took out a loan secured against their house. This is the deal that went bad and left them homeless.
Extraordinarily, it’s claimed that the Walkers then set up a publishing firm offering a bizarre proposition: anyone who bought a copy of its only book—How Not to Dal dy Dir (Stand Firm), by Izzy Wyn-Thomas—would be entered into a drawing to win their house. The draw’s terms promised a property “free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge,” despite the fact it had an outstanding mortgage of around $308,000, plus additional secured loans.
The investigation also uncovered a second property, in France—uninhabitable but previously camped upon—that Winn omitted from the book, possibly to preserve her image of utter destitution. More crucially, The Observer spoke to doctors who questioned her portrayal of Moth’s illness.
The Salt Path follows a set formula. After Moss is diagnosed with corticobasal degeneration (a disease that presents similarly to Parkinson’s), his symptoms get worse; the couple goes for a long walk, and then the symptoms improve. It is the sort of stirring tale that would give hope to anyone with a similar diagnosis. And it was followed up by two sequels.
However, the doctors approached by the paper noted that the life expectancy for CBD sufferers is short—typically just six to eight years after diagnosis—with round-the-clock care needed for much of this time. Meanwhile, according to her books, Moth has had the disease for 18 years and “seems to have no visibly acute symptoms.” Indeed, in 2023 he walked the route of the London Marathon.
This is the big one. For the most part, there’s a touch of derring-do about Walker’s apparent fondness for bending the truth. If nothing else, you have to admire the sheer brass balls on the woman for pulling this off for so long. But when you start to give false hope to the terminally ill—when you start claiming that you can strap on a pair of Merrells and galumph your way back to full health—that’s less forgivable.
Less than a week after the investigation dropped, Walker released a furious 2,300-word rebuttal of its claims. There were medical records showing that Moth’s CBD was atypical and indolent, and claims that she “never sought to offer medical advice” in her books. The French home was merely “an uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch.” As for the money they owed their creditors, “I tracked down our remaining debts and now believe I have … repaid everyone.” The Observer was offered an opportunity to discuss the story, she says, only to turn it down.
By the end of the week, the paper had run a rebuttal of its own. It had offered to talk with Walker six times, it said. Walker has repeatedly written that walking helped reverse the symptoms of Moth’s CBD. And they spoke to a man who inherited the Walkers’ debt, and who estimates that, between the outstanding balance and interest, they still owe him more than $535,000. “Changing your name and disappearing into the wilds is not keeping all communication channels open,” he noted.
Penguin, the book’s publisher, is now in full damage-control mode. In a statement, Penguin said that it “undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence” with The Salt Path, “including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read, as is standard with most works of non-fiction.”
The contract is important. Unlike at, say, Air Mail, where a crack squadron of fact-checkers will haul a writer over the coals for the slightest inaccuracy, the onus with books is on the authors to confirm that everything contained within them is true.
When I wrote my own (profoundly less successful) memoir for Penguin, in 2018, the editorial team headed off any legal issues by stipulating that everyone I mentioned sign a disclaimer promising not to sue. Still spooked at the prospect of writing something false, I took a belt-and-suspenders approach, including the differing recollections of others next to my own. I even let my brother write a chapter, in which he called me a “stroppy twat.” In retrospect, I can see why most authors don’t do this.
This caution exists because the last thing a publisher wants is a repeat of the Million Little Pieces furor. Like The Salt Path, James Frey’s misery-lit memoir was celebrated on publication, only to flame out when it became clear that much of it was fabricated. Within three years, Random House found itself submerged in a pile of lawsuits from unhappy customers, who accused it of consumer fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, misrepresentation, and deceptive business practices. In total, it cost Random House more than $1 million to make the problem go away. It is not impossible to assume that something similar could happen with The Salt Path.
As for Raynor Winn, there is a sense that all involved—publishers included—are hedging their bets while they see how this plays out. Her new book, On Winter Hill, was originally set for release in October, but Penguin has since confirmed that its publication has been delayed, due to the “considerable distress” that the investigation has had on Walker and her husband. If the noise around The Salt Path doesn’t die down soon, it isn’t unrealistic to expect that On Winter Hill will never see the light of day.
On paper, this is the sort of scandal that could permanently sink an author. But let’s not be too hasty. Both editions of The Salt Path, the original paperback and the movie-tie-in version, have raced back onto Amazon’s Top 100 chart in the U.K. after receiving a substantial boost from rubbernecking readers. And there’s a sense that, if Winn eventually decides to tell the unvarnished truth about what really happened, sales could leave those of The Salt Path in the dirt. Would it be tasteful? Not even slightly, but that’s entertainment.
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
