The author of The Salt Path has defended her memoir against “devastating” allegations that parts of it were fabricated, stating that she has had “vitriol poured on me from all quarters” since the reports emerged last week.
Raynor Winn, 63, has described the days since The Observer newspaper published their investigation as the “hardest” of her life, calling the accusations that her husband made up his illness “heartbreaking”.
The author’s much-loved 2018 book tells how she and her husband, Moth, walked the South West Coast Path, a gruelling journey of 630 miles, after a string of private tragedies including the loss of their home in Wales and Moth being diagnosed with a neurological condition.
The Salt Path was a publishing hit, selling 2 million copies and winning Winn legions of fans. Its success prompted two sequels – The Wild Silence (2020) and Landlines (2022) – as well as a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs released in May.
On Sunday (6 July), The Observer published an investigation raising serious doubts over the accuracy of her memoir, including the veracity of Moth’s corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and incurable neurological condition said to be both degenerative and terminal.
The investigation also said that the couple’s legal names are Sally and Timothy Walker, claiming they had misrepresented how they lost their home, which, according to Winn, was due to a bad business investment.
The Observer, however, reported that the couple lost their home after Winn allegedly defrauded her employer of £64,000 in 2008, which she apparently attempted to repay after taking out a loan from a relative.
They allegedly accrued over £100,000 in debt to a relative, which was secured against their home, a 17th century farmhouse in the Welsh countryside that was eventually repossessed. Contrary to being homeless, the report suggested the couple owned land in France at the time of their walk.
Writing on her website on Wednesday night (9 July), Winn said she was “truly sorry” for “mistakes” made while working with her former employer, 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,” she wrote. “Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret and I am truly sorry.” Winn gave no further details about the allegations of theft.
Winn said that the dispute involving Hemmings is not the court case referred to in The Salt Path and it was not the reason they lost their home.
As to the allegations over Moth’s CBS diagnosis, Winn called them “the most heartbreaking” of all.
She shared photographs of redacted clinic letters, addressed to Timothy Walker, that appear to show that he is “treated for CBD/S and has been for many years”.
In one letter, dated 2015, a consultant neurologist wrote that Moth could be “very mildly” affected by the condition, with a separate consultant neurologist in another letter describing his case as “unusual”.
“The clinical course in this case has been so atypical that we shouldn’t discount any possibility. His clinical story has been unique,” the doctor wrote.
Alongside the photos, Winn added: “As I’ve explained many times in my books, we will always be grateful that Moth’s version of CBS is indolent, its slow progression has allowed us time to discover how walking helps him. Others aren’t so lucky.”
PSPA, a charity that supports people with CBD, said it “terminated” its relationship with the family in light of The Observer investigation.
“The last few days have been some of the hardest of my life,” Winn wrote. “Heartbreaking accusations that Moth has made up his illness have been made, leaving us devastated.”
She explained the differences in names by stating that she had long been known as Raynor because she disliked her name Sally Ann, and Moth was simply short for Timothy.
Winn called The Observer article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”, adding that it “seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
Winn said: “The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and me, after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the south-west.
“It’s not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope.
“The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility. And I can’t allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories, or the joy they have given so many.”
The Salt Path’s publisher Penguin said that it "undertook all the necessary due diligence” before publishing Winn’s book in 2018.
Producers of the film, released in the UK only weeks ago, have said they had no knowledge of the concerns.
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