The Salt Path scandal: a hunch, a hint, and six months of shoe-leather reporting

As I am an Observer reporter, people often get in touch with ideas for stories I could be investigating – but the one I received last March was different. This person said they knew Raynor Winn, the author of The Salt Path, and believed there was dishonesty woven into this bestselling memoir that was marketed as “unflinchingly honest”.

The person who contacted me said that Moth, Winn’s husband and the subject of her books, didn’t seem to be as sick as the memoir claimed.

The Salt Path tells the story of how a fundamentally decent couple is assailed by misfortune. First, someone they think of as a friend cons them out of their home, and then, the very same week, Moth is told by a doctor that he has the terminal neurological disease corticobasal degeneration (CBD).

The now-homeless couple then make the extraordinary decision to walk 630 miles along the length of England’s South West Coast path, surviving on a pittance and sleeping in a tent. The strenuous walk and immersion in nature have a healing effect, helping to reverse Moth’s CBD symptoms.

After The Salt Path’s success, the couple had become ambassadors for this rare and untreatable condition – and quite literally walking advertisements for a kind of nature cure. But the neurologists I spoke to said that details of Moth’s case just didn’t seem to add up.

Researching something as private as someone’s health is deeply uncomfortable. My editor was concerned that, since Raynor and Moth had declined an interview and failed to engage with me, I was unlikely to be able to ever say definitively whether Moth had the condition one way or another. Medical miracles do sometimes happen, he warned me.

But there were other details that also made me suspicious. So began six months of shoe-leather reporting. Trawling through interviews, I found that whenever Raynor was asked about Moth’s real name she became evasive and refused to answer. The couple’s legal names – Sally and Tim Walker – seemed to have been concealed from the public. Could they be hiding something? After all, why would you change your name from Walker if you are writing a book about a long hike?

I began by looking into the premise of Winn’s story – the way the couple lost their home. Scouring public records at the Land Registry, I amassed a pile of paperwork related to their house in Wales. It was only when I stumbled across a friendly solicitor named on one of those documents, and he helped translate the property legalese, that I fully understood what I was looking at.

The Walkers had taken out a large private mortgage on their house in Wales; the money had been borrowed from an individual. This is an unusual arrangement, and I was curious enough that my editor agreed to give me a few days in north Wales to dig deeper.

Walking through the windy streets of Pwllheli, the small seaside town where the couple lived for two decades, I struggled to communicate with the Welsh-speaking locals and more than once wondered if I was on a hiding to nothing. Sure, people in pubs and businesses remembered the tall, striking man and the curly-haired woman, but all they could offer me were rumours. Some said she had stolen money from her employer and somehow got away with it. But I needed more than gossip.

Investigative reporting is often like this: a hunch troubled by doubt. Until you finally get a breakthrough. I tracked down the widow of a property surveyor who had run an estate agency on the local high street where Winn was employed as a bookkeeper for seven years. On the phone, I was surprised by her tone – she knew immediately why I was calling. What she revealed was that Winn’s past was far darker than she had let on in her memoirs.

In 2008 Winn had been arrested on suspicion of the theft of tens of thousands of pounds from the small family business where she worked. The private mortgage – that would eventually lead to their house being repossessed – had been acquired to pay back the missing money and prevent criminal charges.

The couple’s old house was now an Airbnb, so I booked to stay in the pretty old barn they had lovingly restored and I found their names – Sally and Tim – still carved into the plaster, professing their love for each other.

The woman who now owns the property complained to me that letters addressed to the Walkers were still coming through her door – mainly bills and bailiff notices, she said. One was from a French local authority requesting property-tax payment. That letter led me to a picturesque village 90 minutes east of Bordeaux where the couple still owns a property and land surrounded by vineyards – hardly the picture of destitution Winn had painted.

A group of senior editors and lawyers at The Observer gathered to discuss the implications of publishing my findings. The revelations were likely to be devastating for Winn’s career and reputation, and would be deeply upsetting for Moth. But the suspicion that very sick people and their relatives might have been misled about Moth’s ability to recover from his illness seemed a pressing issue of public interest.

No story I have broken in my 20 years as a journalist has ever come close to the impact “The real Salt Path” has had. Picked up by every major news outlet in the UK and beyond, the story went viral. Sitting on a train the Sunday morning it was published in early July, I was overwhelmed by a tsunami of messages from outraged readers who had opened their hearts to the couple and felt cheated and duped. The Observer editor-in-chief called. “I think you’ve broken the internet,” he told me.

A few days later, Winn published a long statement on her website describing my reporting as “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”. She went on to say the questions around Moth’s condition were most painful, and she released a series of doctors’ letters. Two of the letters mentioned CBD, and for a few gut-wrenching hours I wondered if I might have got the story wrong. But the neurologists I spoke to translated the medical jargon and made it clear that neither letter offered a definitive diagnosis for Moth.

Three months after my findings were published, I found myself parked outside a motorway service station a few hours from London. I was there to meet Winn’s niece.

This quiet farmer, in a corner of a busy service-station cafe, nervously showed me a letter. It appeared to have been written by Winn, and in it she admitted to emptying the bank accounts of her parents-in-law and her own mother, leaving them without savings and unable to pay for basics like rent.

In all I spoke to eight members of Winn and Moth’s families across the UK and in France. They verified the story the “confession” letter told and said that the public persona of Raynor Winn was at odds with the Sally Walker they knew.

Winn has published a second statement on her website saying that she did not write that letter nor did she steal money from family. People had an axe to grind against her, she claimed.

So many people had known for years about the deceptions in The Salt Path but felt they had no way to correct the record. Winn’s niece told me she had tried calling Penguin but got through to a call centre where she wasn’t taken seriously. Most of all, these people knew that The Salt Path had made a lot of people money and they feared repercussions from powerful vested interests. They were waiting, they said, for someone they trusted to track them down. I was the first person who had really taken the time to listen to them.

There’s no doubt that Sally Walker is a talented creative writer, but perhaps her skill extends beyond books. Somewhere along the way, having left behind the mess she and her husband had made of their lives in Wales, Walker seemed to have invented new personas for them: Raynor Winn and Moth. Then she set about writing a book for her characters: The Salt Path – a memoir not about their lives as they were but about how she wished them to be.

5 March 2025
A reader gets in touch with Chloe saying they have concerns Raynor Winn has lied in her “unflinchingly honest” memoir. They raise questions about Moth’s illness and provide the legal names of Raynor and Moth – Sally and Tim Walker and the name of the village where they lived in Wales, Pwllheli, none of which is in the public domain.

11 March
Chloe contacts a neurologist, who reveals he is sceptical

31 March
Chloe emails Winn to ask for an interview to write a feature about Moth’s medical journey and apparent recovery.

11 April
Winn’s literary agent, Jen Christie, says the couple won’t be available for interview as they are working on a TV documentary about the science behind Moth’s recovery.

7 May
Chloe finds Land Registry documents that show the Walkers lost their home afterK a private £100K mortgage went unpaid for years.

1 June
Chloe travels to Wales and stays in the Walkers’ old property. She is told of unpaid bills in their names, including property tax bills from France. She also hears about rumours that Walker defrauded her employer, an estate agent/property surveyor.

5 June
Chloe speaks to the widow of “Cooper”, a relative of Moth, to ask about the private mortgage he entered into with the Walkers. She tells Chloe that Walker was in trouble with the police but didn’t know the charges.

10 June
Chloe speaks to Ros Hemmings, who says her husband Martin, Winn’s former employer called the police when he suspected she had stolen £64K. Winn was arrested. She fled to London to borrow money from Cooper, which she used to pay back Hemmings and avoid further criminal action.

23 June
Chloe contacts Winn, her agent, publisher and the film production company to ask for a private meeting to discuss “troubling evidence that casts doubt” on the account in The Salt Path and Winn’s other books. None agree.

25 June
Chloe sends follow-up emails with a formal list of the allegations The Observer is considering publishing.

30 June
Chloe travels to France to see the Walkers’ property.

5 July
The Observer publishes Chloe’s initial findings. The same day she starts talking to family members who claim Walker stole her in-laws’ savings. With no hard evidence, The Observer does not publish the allegations.

7 July
PSPA, the charity supporting people with CBD cut ties with the Walkers.

9 July
A statement on Winn’s website says the investigation is “grotesquely unfair,highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life”. She insists the couple were conned out of their home. She claims she offered to engage with The Observer but was refused.

11 July
Penguin announces it is delaying the release of Winn’s fourth book.

9 August
The Observer publishes accounts of people Winn writes about having met on the walk. They say her accounts are inaccurate and question the dates the couple claim to have walked.

10 October
Chloe speaks to Winn’s niece and other family members who say the Walkers lived with family members at the time they claim to have been homeless.. She provides an apparent confession letter fro admits to stealing from her employer, her in-laws and her mother. With these testimonies The Observer publishes the new claims.m Walker.

15 October
Chloe finds a copy of Walker’s first novel, a fictional story very similar to the real events that lead to the Walker’s house being repossessed.

14 December
Winn publishes another website statement denying taking money from family and denying writing the letter. She hinting the new allegations are from people with an axe to grind.

15 December
The Observer and Candour Films release The Salt Path Scandal.

13 January 2026
The Observer releases a seven-part podcast series: The Walkers - The Real Salt Path.

Photographs by Abstract Aerial Art/Getty Images, Karen Robinson/The Observer, Alice Anderson, Jon Hall/Saltbeef Productions