A former landlord of The Salt Path author, Raynor Winn, claims that her husband, Moth Winn, told him that he had months to live in 2021.
Bill Cole, a city worker who brought Haye Farm in Cornwall in 2011, took pity on the couple after reading Raynor Winn’s best-selling 2018 book. The Salt Path tells how she and her husband 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.
Cole, who didn’t live on the farm due to his wife needing to be near a hospital for her cancer treatment, offered the Winn’s a chance to live on the property for a very small rent fee. The farm was featured in season three of Rick Stein’s Cornwall in 2024, when the celebrity chef visited the couple, who showed him how to make cider.
Winn wrote her next books at Haye Farm, The Wild Silence (2020) and Landlines (2022), with Cole telling The Observer that the couple “seemed happy there” and that it had been beneficial to Moth’s health.
However, Cole claims that in October 2021, Moth had been informed by doctors that he only had a few months left to live. “He put his head in his hands and he said: ‘We went to the hospital this week and I’ve been told not to plan beyond Christmas.’” Cole explained. “I just went: ‘Oh my God!’ and gave him a big hug.”
When Landlines was published in 2022, Cole read that Moth had been told by a neurologist that his brain scan was now “normal” and that his condition had significantly improved.
“I was reading it on a train,” Cole told The Observer, “and I just went: ‘What the hell?’ It just makes no sense whatsoever.”
The Observer claims that Cole contacted Raynor Winn to ask why he hadn’t been informed about the good news. Raynor Winn allegedly ignored the question when she responded to Cole days later. The landlord claims that the couple terminated their tenancy shortly afterwards and has had almost no contact with them since.
In a lengthy statement issued 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.
In the same statement, she addressed the “heartbreaking” allegations over Moth’s CBS diagnosis; corticobasal degeneration is a rare and incurable neurological condition said to be both degenerative and terminal.
She shared photographs of redacted clinic letters, addressed to Timothy Walker (Moth’s real name), that appear to show that he is “treated for CBD/S and has been for many years”.
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.”
Winn called The Observer article “grotesquely unfair” and “highly misleading”, adding that it “seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
The Salt Path’s publisher Penguin said that it "undertook all the necessary due diligence” before publishing Winn’s book in 2018.
Producers of a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, released in the UK only weeks ago, have said they had no knowledge of the concerns.
The Salt Path author ordeal caused ex-employer to ‘lose his trust in human beings’
When it comes to the Salt Path scandal, we only have ourselves to blame
Salt Path author’s next book delayed due to ‘considerable distress’
Refunds issued to The Salt Path fans after author Raynor Winn pulls out of tour
The Salt Path author breaks silence on ‘devastating’ claims over husband’s illness
The Salt Path publishers issue statement after allegations of factual inaccuracies
