By Liam Kelly and Natasha Leake
Many questions have been asked about The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s “unflinchingly honest” best-selling memoir, in the past week. Why exactly was the home of Winn and her husband, Moth, in North Wales repossessed? Did she really embezzle £64,000 from her former employer, Martin Hemmings? Were they ever actually homeless, or did they secretly own property in France?
How did they walk the arduous 630 miles (1000 kilometres) of the South West Coast Path – and launch into other mammoth journeys in subsequent years – after Moth was diagnosed with an apparently terminal brain condition? Did they even do the walk? What explains the fact that he has lived with corticobasal degeneration (CBD) for 18 years, when the typical life expectancy is much lower than that? Why did Sally and Tim Walker adopt the names of Raynor and Moth Winn?
Raynor Winn and her husband Moth Winn at a screening of The Salt Path in May. However, there are doubts about aspects of her memoir.Credit: Getty Images
And how was she able to release her story through one of the biggest publishers in the country – getting rich in the process?
All of these questions have been raised since The Observer’s bombshell exposé last weekend, which cast doubt on the veracity of one of the biggest literary success stories in recent years. Almost a week on – and despite Winn releasing a lengthy statement, as well as some of her husband’s medical letters, intended to rebut many of the investigation’s claims – the picture is now murkier than ever.
The Salt Path quickly became a phenomenon, and a staple of book clubs across Britain, when it was published by Penguin’s Michael Joseph imprint in 2018. It was seen as the quintessential underdog story, with a plucky couple defying seemingly insurmountable odds through the power of love and sheer tenacity.
It has sold more than 2 million copies, was shortlisted for a glut of top honours and won the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize in 2019, which awards £10,000 ($20,600) to a debut author aged 50 or above. A film adaptation was released in May, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs as Raynor and Moth Winn. The author has since released two more bestselling non-fiction books with Michael Joseph, 2021’s The Wild Silence and Landlines the following year.
Crucially, The Salt Path has always been billed as a work of non-fiction. What is written in its pages is supposed to be the truth. Part of the reason that it has been so popular is readers’ belief that the couple were the “good guys” and that the healing power of nature, as described by Winn, is real.
The Salt Path sold millions of copies and spawned a movie starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs.Credit: In Pictures via Getty Images
The sense of betrayal felt by many who bought and loved The Salt Path is reflected in the feelings of locals in the Welsh town of Pwllheli, where the Winns lived under the Walker name until they lost their home in 2011. At the mention of the book, staff at the market town’s Spa supermarket flinch, their faces clouding over. A shop attendant admits that The Observer’s front page caused a stir on Sunday morning. “There was a lady who wanted blood in here the other day,” she recalls. “She was ranting and raving about the story for a while.”
Winn initially responded to the allegations with a short statement, but it did little to stem the torrent of questions facing her and it became obvious that she would have to be more forthcoming. On Wednesday night, Winn published a 2300-word essay on her website in which she described the investigation as being “grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
She addressed many of the points raised by The Observer, such as the claim that she embezzled money from Hemmings, that the couple only lost their home after taking out a loan to pay Hemmings back and that her husband’s CBD is not as serious as she made it out to be.
“I worked for Martin Hemmings in the years before the economic crash of 2008. For me, it was a pressured time. It was also a time when mistakes were being made in the business,” Winn wrote. “Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.”
She went on: “Mr Hemmings made an allegation against me to the police, accusing me of taking money from the company. I was questioned, I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions. I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. The terms of the settlement were willingly agreed by both parties; Mr Hemmings was as keen to reach a private resolution as I was.”
Ros Hemmings, the widow of Martin, told The Telegraph that the episode had left her and her husband “feeling rotten” and that she “wanted to throw coffee over the television” at the mere mention of The Salt Path. “I’m sick of hearing about them, really. They’ve made their millions: go and enjoy it, they might as well. They’ve paid me back, so I have no axe to grind.”
As to the state of her husband’s health, Winn said it was an “utterly vile, unfair, and false suggestion” to say he did not suffer from CBD. “Among The Observer’s many accusations, the most heartbreaking is the suggestion that Moth has made up his illness,” she wrote.
Winn also claims that the property the couple own in France is “an uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch” that they have not visited since 2007, and attempted to explain away their use of pseudonyms. “Winn is my maiden name and, like most women who have married, I’ve used both my maiden name, Winn, and married name, Walker,” she wrote online.
Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in The Salt Path.Credit: Kevin Baker
“In the early years after Moth and I met, I told him I disliked my name, Sally Ann, it made me think of ringlets and gingham dresses, and how I wished I’d been given the family name of Raynor. From then on, he called me Ray. It is the name many people who are close to me have known me by, and the name I love and chose as my pen name. Moth is just an abbreviation of his name – Timothy.”
Much as she may wish it to, Winn’s statement is unlikely to be the last word on this scandal. There are still questions over the precise order of events that led to the couple losing their home, while the doctors’ letters to her husband that she uploaded appear to raise other questions. One says that he is “affected very mildly” by CBD, while another says that he has an “atypical form” of the condition.
How can it be that, seven years after a bestselling memoir has been published and turned into a film featuring Hollywood stars, there are only arguments about what is true now? It may surprise the reading public to know how little fact-checking of memoirs happens, even at the largest publishing houses in Britain. Most publishers satisfy themselves with what is known as a “warranty clause” in standard author contracts, in which writers legally undertake that what they have written is not untrue, that it is not the product of plagiarism and that they have the right to publish the work.
Going through a story like Winn’s line-by-line – or tracking down former acquaintances, as The Observer did – to confirm the truth is not affordable for any publisher. “If you ask any publisher who’s been around for a while, it’s really just not feasible,” says Ravi Mirchandani, the head of Simon & Schuster’s Summit Books.
“The approach of publishers on both sides of the Atlantic is to trust their authors. Obviously, we question things when we’re editing, but we’re questioning within the context of our, frankly, general knowledge. If somebody says, ‘My house was repossessed because … ’, you just believe them. Maybe it should be otherwise, but it’s never been the way things are done in book publishing.”
The head of another rival reckons that there are some unscrupulous authors who will abuse the trust of publishers, and that “there’s no real mechanism to really check … There are some con artists; it is going to happen once in a while.” This publisher did, however, express amazement that such a high-profile book had prompted these kinds of allegations.
A former Penguin executive said that editors and publishers were so stretched that they could not do proper due diligence on inbound non-fiction books.
“There’s a genuine problem in corporate publishing, where the editorial culture across the board has been so diminished versus something like The New York Times or The Telegraph, or whatever, where there are editorial standards and checks,” he said.
“You’ve basically got editors who are now sales people, comms people, they’re doing everything … Fact checking is rarely used and, when it is, it’s more on serious non-fiction projects, not memoirs.”
Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in The Salt Path.
Once a book like The Salt Path is published, and then exceeds all imagined sales projections, it means that any sequels are also perhaps not scrutinised as much as they ought to be. “It’s such a hits-based business,” the former Penguin insider says. “Most books don’t work, so when something does work, the last thing anyone wants to do is stand in its way.”
Winn’s sequels follow a familiar pattern: her husband’s health declines, they embrace the supposed healing powers of the great outdoors and everybody is uplifted when things start to improve. This did not appear to ring alarm bells at Penguin.
The publisher only went public on Tuesday, a full three days after the scandal broke.
“Penguin (Michael Joseph) published The Salt Path in 2018 and, like many readers, we were moved and inspired by Raynor’s story and its message of hope,” it said in a statement to The Bookseller industry magazine.
“Penguin undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence, including a contract with an author warranty about factual accuracy, and a legal read, as is standard with most works of non-fiction. Prior to the Observer inquiry, we had not received any concerns about the book’s content.”
In hindsight, it’s easy to see why people might seek to pick holes in such a neat story.
“I thought The Salt Path was a book about a guy who was going to die in the not-too-distant future and he’s been around for such a long time that they’ve published books two and three,” the rival publisher said.
“Maybe by the time book three came around, and what seems to be very convenient timing about [Moth’s] illness getting worse and then getting better again, maybe there should have been more questions.
“But by that point, you’re not really incentivised to. ‘Either we could publish a new book and be guaranteed to sell tens if not hundreds of copies – or we can try and really get to the bottom of this.’ Even if you did have suspicions, it would be pretty hard to follow … ”
The Salt Path was a surprise monster hit by a debut author writing about adversity in a part of the country that is not deemed fashionable by much of the metropolitan literary class. As well as Winn, it should have been a career-maker for its publisher, Fenella Bates, but a year ago she made the unusual move to head up the non-fiction team at Puffin, Penguin’s children’s imprint. Bates did not respond to a request for comment.
Multiple sources reckon that Winn would have been paid an advance of about £10,000 for The Salt Path – a modest sum, but not an unhelpful one if, as The Observer reported, she owed £100,000 to a distant relative of her husband in a loan secured against the value of their home that she had taken out to return the money that she had allegedly embezzled.
“Most books completely fail and disappear without a trace and Raynor Winn probably thought she could make whatever the advance of the book was, a reasonable amount of money, and move on,” says a leading literary agent. “It’s only when the book achieves a certain level of prominence, from which she has therefore made a load of money, that the veracity of it may be questioned.
“She would have never expected it was going to be a million-copy seller or a movie with famous people in it.” If The Observer allegations are true, he supposes, “she must have been living in terror of exposure”.
As well as the truth of the claims raised this week, there are also questions about the Winns’ original 1000-kilometre walk from Minehead, Somerset, to Poole, Dorset.
Quintin Lake, the author of The Perimeter: A Photographic Journey around the Coast of Britain, spent five years walking the coastline and spent a lot of time on the South West Coast Path. His book, which was published in May, has been longlisted for the Wainwright Prize for nature writing.
Lake said he found much of The Salt Path implausible, from Winn’s descriptions of locals treating her and her husband badly for being homeless to the ineptitude of their camping set-ups.
“A couple of times, people mistook me for being homeless because you have a little tent by the coast and you’re by yourself in crappy weather where there’s no tourists. But I found that there wasn’t any prejudice and that people were quite kind and neutral. I found the British, universally, were pretty understanding in that,” Lake said.
“From the practicalities of camping and backpacking, it seemed like [the Winns] were so hapless about how they undertook it that I found it hard to understand why you wouldn’t improve. Obviously they were middle-aged people that were suddenly chucked into needing to camp, and that’s not easy for anyone,” he added. “But if you’re making it a lifestyle, you tend to learn how to work around it, how to camp in the lee of the bays, how to camp out of sight. My eyebrows would raise when I read it because, yes, it’s tricky for a bit, but then you sort of figure it out … Especially if you’re travelling for months on end. If you don’t, you’re totally screwed.”
Lake said that the story told in The Salt Path seemed “off” to him and he “felt quite vindicated” after reading the exposé into the Winns’ background. “Their particular story relies on the truth of it, because it is a redemptive memoir,” he said. “So if there’s no redemption, there’s no story. I just felt really shocked and surprised.”
The locals in Wales are experiencing similar emotions. A retired man in his 60s, who did not want to be named, felt “let down and disappointed” in general by reports about the couple, though he admitted that “[Sally] must have been a clever person”. He and his wife only discovered that the Walkers had “just disappeared” overnight in the early 2010s through word of mouth.
When it comes to the Hemmings, the couple who allegedly found themselves short of more than £64,000, the town is universally loyal in its devotion to the pair.
“We would always protect the Hemmings”, a local couple said. The owner of a local garage described Walker’s employer Martin Hemmings, who died of cancer years before the story broke, as a “pillar of the community”. The news that the Walkers allegedly embezzled money from Hemmings has shocked her. “Martin was a lovely chap,” agreed another local standing by the seafront.
And by the local Wetherspoon pub, other members of the town who have heard the story can scarcely believe it. “I think it’s horrendous what they did [if true],” said one local who ran a pharmacy for many years in a nearby town. Another admitted that he read that the couple had stolen from the garage, and suggested that they should be made to pay back the people they owed.
“If they did steal, I hope they made some recompense to the people they owe money to,” he said over a pint. For him, the story is about more than the couple; it is about the truth. “The whole story really makes you wonder what the line between truth and fiction is,” he said.
So, what happens next? Multiple sources say that Penguin has been thrown into “crisis mode” and its bosses would be racing to establish the definitive truth about one of their most successful authors. The consensus in the publishing industry seems to be that the book can be salvaged if the only issue in question is the reality of the Winns’ finances and Raynor’s apparent embezzlement. If Moth’s illness is found to have been invented or exaggerated, however, it will probably be dropped.
Summit’s Mirchandani feels sympathy with his fellow publishers. “Most of us would just feel, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ and, ‘Thank God it’s happening to somebody else’ rather than oneself.”
The consequences could be serious for the Winns. The couple have been dropped as ambassadors of PSPA, a charity that helps people with CBD, while Raynor Winn’s tour appearances with the Gigspanner Big Band have been cancelled. PSPA said that “too many questions currently remain unanswered” about the Winns’ story.
A spokesman for Number 9 Films and Shadowplay Features, which produced the big-screen adaptation, said that “the film is a faithful adaptation of the book that we optioned” and that the concerns raised “relate to the book and are a matter for the author”. Anderson and Isaacs, who played the Winns in the film, have not addressed the claims and their representatives have not responded to requests to comment.
A fortnight after The Salt Path film was released, Penguin Michael Joseph triumphantly announced that it had bought a fourth non-fiction book by Raynor Winn. On Winter Hill is said to tell the story of her solo assault on the Coast to Coast Walk across northern England in harsh weather. Predictably, it is about her seeking refuge in nature from her husband’s apparently ailing health.
“Despite 45 years of walking together, setbacks in her husband, Moth’s, health have led him to see his decline as inevitable, which Raynor refuses to accept. Feeling trapped, she is drawn north, like a migratory bird, seeking the peace and hope that walking brings her,” the publicity bumf reads.
“Navigating harsh weather and tangled emotions, Raynor reflects on the mountains they’ve climbed. Her journey becomes a meditation on our connection to the land and its power to help us remember, rebuild, and reclaim what is lost.”
On Winter Hill is supposed to be published on October 23. Whether it actually hits bookshelves will likely depend on what truth is established in the coming days and weeks.
The Telegraph, London
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