Just thought you might be interested in this article in the Observer on Sunday:
'Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a couple of sequels out of it.’
There’s nothing we Brits love more than a story about an underdog battling adversity and the inextinguishable resilience of the human spirit
The twinge of self-reproach I felt then has evaporated. The Observer yesterday carried a report into the background of that book’s author, Raynor Winn, and her husband Moth (real names Sally and Tim Walker), and discovered that many details in her memoir were, to put it delicately, not quite as she claimed.
The inciting incident for The Salt Path was the couple finding themselves homeless and destitute after their ‘forever home’ was taken from them, Wynn wrote, when they invested in a friend’s company which failed – and that faithless friend somehow won a court case assigning their house to him.
The Observer’s reporter Chloe Hadjimatheou, however, discovered evidence that the real reason the Walkers lost their house is that while working as a book-keeper Sally had defrauded the small company she worked for out of £64,000; and that the house became collateral on a loan she took out to reimburse her victims in order to prevent criminal charges being preferred against her. And it appears that even while – according to The Salt Path – the couple were left after the loss of their house with no option but to wild camp in the UK, they owned a property in rural France.
Since then public records have shown five county court judgments against the Walkers between 2011 and 2014, at least one of which came four years before the publication of that bestselling book. A local garage owner who says they still owe him nearly £800 asked the paper’s reporter plaintively: ‘If you see them, can you tell them to pay me? I think they can afford it now.’
As for Tim Walker’s ‘miraculous’ recovery from the degenerative brain disease his wife claimed he had – corticobasal degeneration, or CBD, a particularly savage neurological affliction in the same family as Parkinson’s – the Observer spoke to no fewer than nine specialists in CBD and they are reported as being unanimously ‘sceptical about the length of time he has had it, his lack of acute symptoms and his apparent ability to reverse them’. One said simply that the story ‘does not pass the sniff test’.'
Interesting!
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