The Salt Path has been quite a phenomenon. As soon as it was published in 2018, Raynor Winn’s memoir – about how she and her husband, Moth, had overcome the loss of their house and Moth’s terminal diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare neurological condition, by walking the 630-mile South West Coast Path, with almost no resources – became a huge success.
It was well reviewed. Touching interviews with Winn appeared. The book was shortlisted for both the 2018 Costa Book Award and the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing. It won the inaugural RSL Christopher Bland Prize for debut authors over 50. With a pastoral cover by printmaker Angela Harding, it soon became a best-seller, topping the Sunday Times lists for months, and turned into a mainstay of independent bookshops. Altogether, some two million copies were sold. Raynor Winn became a “charity ambassador” to the South West Coast Path, many walkers setting off in emulation of the book. The couple also became fundraisers for the PSPA, a charity raising awareness of CBD and progressive supranuclear palsy.
Winn has since published two more similar memoirs of walks in adversity, with her husband continuing to keep his illness at bay – The Wild Silence in 2020, and Landlines in 2022. In May, a film of The Salt Path, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, filmed on the coastal path, found a receptive audience. I was surprised to learn that my own mother and her friends, in their nineties, had made a trip to the cinema for the first time in ages to catch the movie – though they only quite liked it.
This story appears to be in doubt, however. Last Sunday’s Observer splashed on a devastating exposé of the book and its author by the investigative journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou. She alleged that the couple’s real names were Sally and Tim Walker. Far from being the innocent, exploited victims of a business deal that had gone wrong, Sally Walker faced criminal proceedings for allegedly stealing around £64,000 from her employer, then borrowed £100,000 from a relative to pay her way out of the case; the couple then lost their house when the relative’s debt was called in and enforced by a court. Far from being completely homeless, the Observer claims, the couple still owned a property, albeit in ruins and beset by debts, in south-west France. Perhaps most damagingly, nine neurologists and researchers specialising in CBD cast doubt on whether Moth, diagnosed in 2013, could possibly be as well as he seems to be, had he had CBD for so long, or have had the miraculous improvements described in the memoir. The PSPA promptly broke links with the pair, taking down a video on its website of Moth talking about his condition.
In response, Winn told Sky News and the Guardian that the Observer article was “highly misleading”. Her statement continued: “We are taking legal advice and won’t be making any further comment at this time. 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.”
Its publisher Penguin Books, having called The Salt Path “an unflinchingly honest, inspiring and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world”, today said that it “undertook all the necessary due diligence” before the book’s release. The film’s producers, meanwhile, have said that “there were no known claims against the book at the time of optioning it or producing and distributing the film and we undertook all necessary due diligence before acquiring the book”.
It’s the first movie to be directed by the acclaimed theatre producer Marianne Elliott (War Horse, Angels in America, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and the script is by the playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who had previously been given the book for Christmas by her mother. Hélène Louvart, who has worked with directors like Claire Denis and Agnès Varda, is the cinematographer. They may be feeling indignant now.
As for the film itself, Gillian Anderson embraces the indignities of the walk bravely, down to a severely sunburned nose, but she remains distinctly glamorous, even dainty, in suitably natty outfits. In the book, “Raynor Winn” worries about her weight and frequently remarks that, not being able to wash often, they both smelled so bad that people would swiftly move away from them. These embarrassments have been dropped. Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy, Georgy Zhukov in The Death of Stalin) is solid and sympathetic as Moth, gasping and grunting mightily as he struggles with every ascent and descent, each one seeming beyond his strength. In the book, his pain and disability seem located mainly in a shoulder. In the film, he is alarmingly incapacitated from the off.
Gillian Anderson had evidently been so taken by The Salt Path she had attempted to option the book herself prior to being approached by its eventual producers. Before the shoot started, both Anderson and Isaacs spent a day with the Walkers at their home in Cornwall. Isaacs, promoting the film, was effusive about how Moth had been “incredibly generous about opening himself up to me… I’m madly in love with him. That’s the truth.” Gillian Anderson was more cautious about Raynor: “I was surprised at how guarded she was… It was interesting to encounter a certain steeliness.”
If the film-makers feel stung by the allegations against the Winns, all those who have invested in Raynor Winn’s tale simply as readers or cinema-goers, or walkers in their wake, will feel similarly. Read now, the memoir does seem implausible, its tone off throughout. Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): “I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don’t let me be left alone, let me die.” This scene was quietly dropped from the film.
The explanation of their financial crash and their reduction to a £48-a-week tax credit never made any sense at all, despite the moving exclamations about how “we lost, lost the case, lost the house, and lost ourselves”. Readers didn’t seem to mind, though. Nor did they care that the exalted passages about healing communion with nature were just as unconvincing. “I could stand in the wind and I was the wind, the rain, the sea; it was all me, and I was nothing within it.” The book ends with Winn saying she had no idea what the future would bring. “All I knew was that we were lightly salted blackberries hanging in the last of the summer sun, and this perfect moment was the only one we needed.” Being a lightly salted blackberry seems unlikely to suffice now.
Comparisons have been made between The Salt Path furore and other controversies over authors’ authenticity – but that storytellers often make things up is not surprising. What is more revealing about The Salt Path case is how large and eager an audience it found for its story of pilgrimage, redemption and miraculous healing.
Winn is careful to emphasise early in the book that she doesn’t “believe in God, in any higher force”, yet this serves only to make her homespun parable of salvation all the more approachable to those with a faith-shaped hole in their lives no longer occupied by the late Church of England. The acceptable, overtly fictional version of this story was The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, the debut novel of radio dramatist Rachel Joyce, published in 2012, the year before the events described in The Salt Path. In this book, our hero receives a letter from a dying friend in Berwick-upon-Tweed and, though not religious, sets off on foot on a penitential pilgrimage of 627 miles (compared to the 630 claimed by Winn) in the belief that while he keeps walking, she will miraculously stay alive. Sentimental, mildly entertaining and hardly objectionable, it has sold four million copies and been translated into 37 languages. In 2023, it was made into a film starring the unimprovably English Jim Broadbent and Penelope Wilton. Could Winn have read it?
There is a long list of “inspirational” writers, from Paulo Coelho to L Ron Hubbard, who fabricated the marvels they wrote about. Such is our hunger for inspiration, though, and however potentially dubious a source, that we ask no questions until too late.
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