BBC Radio Wales, BBC Sounds, Secrets of the Salt Path.

BBC Radio Wales, BBC Sounds, Secrets of the Salt Path.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0n5p4w5

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n7b8j7

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj32vx61x6lo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80p2pzgpmgo

In films and television drama writers are one dimensional. Invariably, they are portrayed as some tortured soul that knocks off an international bestseller. It happens. Irvine Welsh is the poster boy. Trainspotting. A collection of short stories in Edinburgh (Leith) dialect that somehow became the script for an upcoming director and actors such as Ewan McGregor. Logically it should never have been a bestseller. Should never have been a seller. Irvine Welsh should never have been a multimillionaire writer. Should never have been a writer. Too often I tune into Facebook writers’ groups and someone will come out with the immortal line I’ve written a book…and nobody has bought a copy.

Get fucking real, I feel like telling them. But I never do. They’ve bought into a Field of Dreams and the much misquoted line, ‘if you build it, they will come’.

Readers don’t come. 99.999% of authors know you have to find them. Writing a book is the easy part. Selling is the hard part for many, including me.

We would love to believe and be believed and allowed into the inner sanctum of the big five booksellers. The Salt Path was that exception to the rule, rule. Raynor Winn’s book seemed almost fated (if you believe in that kind of thing) to be an international bestseller. Everything that could have went right went right, including Covid19 which meant lots of people were once again reading and looking at the walls and wishing they were outside. The sale of campervans went stratospheric. The Salt Path was the perfect book for a human tragedy.

Reading is what I do. I recognised the opening gambit. Ray and Moth lose their house. They are blameless, but their kids will be away from home. They’ll be fine. No children (or young adults) will be hurt in the making of this adventure story. It’s not Jane Eyre. But neither is the author Charlotte Bronte.

Ramp up the drama. Moth is dying. He’s a rare degenerative disease. Corticalbasaldegeneration (CBD). All the kind of things we take for granted like walking and talking and breathing will fall away as the neurons in his brain no longer work in the way they should.

Ray has an epiphany. They should walk The Salt Path. 650 miles. Wild camping. They would have less than £50 a week to live on. My thoughts here were many refugee families face similar plights. For some with supposed accommodating and meals, £12 a week.

Ray tells the reader how they had a budget of £50 a week. Often it turned out to be much worse and so much less. But they were grateful.

Neither was I particularly taken with the idea that the council had failed them. They’d been offered a place, but it was full of alkies and junkies. I’m not sure what they were expecting. There’s a housing crisis. Start at the bottom. Work your way up?

I’d a lot of time for the guys that managed fitba teams in the seventies. Usually, it would be an old guy and there would be trip to somewhere. People had given him cash. He’d borrowed some to buy some more drink. Pledging to pay it back. When he got to the bottom of the barrel, there was no barrel. I understand that.

I’m not that fussed that Raynor stole about £64,000 from accountant friends. Nobody much would have benefited from sending her to prison. Technically, she made herself homeless. But it is kinda funny with all that talk about not having anywhere to stay, they’d another property in France.

As for Moth’s neurological condition, CBD, well, I wish the guy well. A guy I went to school with was scared that his sickness benefit would be cut if the powers that be found out he could cut his front lawn. Cadogan Street could be and was an unforgiving place. I’m not sure Moth would do very well there. My old school mate died. He proved to himself he was sick enough to have received benefits. Different audiences ask for different levels of proof. As readers, we don’t really care. I read The Salt Path because of the publicity. I’m a believer in the miracles of science because they aren’t miracles and you don’t have to believe in them. I’m not a believer in the cure-all properties of the great outdoors or extended walking because you can never do enough and you can die trying to prove you are one of the elect. Most do. Read on.

Credits: Narrator: Aimee-Ffion Edwards Producers: Gemma Dunstan & Helen Clifton Sound Design: Nigel Lewis, Cathy Robinson & Meic Parry Executive Producer: James Robinson & Karen Voisey Original Music: Dyfan Jones Archive research: Jessica Llewellyn Research: Callum McCulloch-Nowlan Production Managers Eleri McAuliffe & Sharon Laban Sounds Commissioner - Bridget Curnow

Notes. 

A story of hope and healing?

Sally Walker is Raynor Winn.

Sally Walker, pretty much overnight, transformed herself into an author and international bestseller.

How did she do it?

‘I’d didn’t know anything about publishing. I’d never writing anything before…’

According to Raynor, it kinda happened by accident.

Six years before, there was another book, published by Sally and Tim Walker.

2010. North Wales.

The Walkers fall further into debt, and they come up an intriguing plan to try and save their dream home. It involves a book, but it’s not The Salt Path. Like everything about this story the truth is bit more complicated. But will their plan pay off? And is just who is the author of this mysterious book?

Tim lost his job with the National Trust 2004.

Sally lost her job after being accused of embezzling £64 000 from the estate agent she worked for. 

In order to avoid prosecution Sally and Tim took out a £100 000 loan. 18% interest rate.

2012. set up a publishing company. Makes sense. Sally said she’d always dreamed of being a published author.

How Not To Dal Dy Dir

Escape to the Country.

Current market price £435 000.

Prize draw. Book-based house raffle. 2013 publishing company dissolved.

Ballifs banging on the door. Eviction notice from our house. From our life.

‘I was under the stair when I decided to walk…630 miles’.

Decision to walk, spontaneous? Hadn’t written since she was a teenager?

Planning to publish another book… Three  Mountains and a Ceilidh.

Did they do the walk?

Landscape of Cornish Coast.

‘We could just walk…it was a ridiculous thing to say.’

2013. Begin walk. Ordinary everyday world and on the other side, the sea. A world apart.

Tadge. Lives offgrid. ‘Frustrated boxticker’.  ‘Spacetheft’. Go and pay £15.

‘However you classify the homeless, we became two to them in the summer of 2013.’

Hugely rising house prices. And homeless.

800 household in temporary accommodation. Cornwall.

Path equivalent of walking Everest four times.

Andy and Jo did it. Homeless. They walked it. Lived in tent. Found support and community. People overwhelmingly kind. 

Sally and Tim had land 50 000 euros home in South of France? Is it OK to call yourself homeless?

Bed and breakfast with people with drug and alcohol problems.

Andy and Jo, the real salt path, what did you think?

I think she had an agenda. And she’d been planning it for a long time. A lot of it was the history of places, in a lot of detail.

Andy and Jo found a home in Newquay?

Dec 2025.

Observer claims staying with family member during the winter.

Isn’t everybody entitled to their own truth?

Something being sold eg health claims? Factual accuracy.

Debbie Hemmings. I don’t wish ill of them. I just wish they’d tell the truth.

Francis Gilbert. Present themselves as victims. Agents of their own destruction.

At the end of the book, a woman says they can stay in her chapel.

Would Ray’s life as Sally Walker come back to haunt her?

2020 Covid. Lockdown. Small book about walking goes global.

2018 finished walk. Artistic language? Global bestseller.

Offered flat.

Still setting up tent in new home?

‘I wrote up the notes. Intending to give it to Moth…Then my daughter read it.’

Big Issue article. Raynor Winn. Homeless 2013… I’d like an opportunity to write an article. Rebrands herself.

Big Issue published article. Now in print. Four pages.

September 2017.  Got an agent. Book came out March 2018. Tom Barr Simons on same street as chapel. Gaps in narrative?

Tessa Scalyor. Moth> came into my shop. He loved crystals. ‘I want that one’. He was just charming. Then I met Raynor. Very kindly, she gave me her agent’s number. Hardhitting agent.

BBC BookClub> books in Cornwall. One of the busiest bookclubs. So many people love the idea.

Interview on Radio 4. It shut up the charts.

March 2020. Lockdown> pace of life slows. Salt Path> wellness and walking> 2 million copies> 25 languages?

Rachel Hemmings> whom she stole money from. Her sister felt it was important a different story should be told.

How dare this woman. She didn’t say the truth. She’s told a thread of lies. Believes a thread of lies.  

‘The Wild Silence’. Follow up. Offered farm for rewilding the land. Visited by Rick Stein’s Cornwall.

Feeds my soul.

Sam> Bill Call> felt ghastly and betrayed by the couple.

Ruth, neighbour and reading fanatic. Bestselling author of over 30 books. She was a bit of a rock star. Ray wanted to talk about my writing journey.

One part didn’t sit right. Losing her home. Ray’s sheep. Died. Animal lover. I love my pets. I brought this up. She didn’t really respond. I felt awkward. I went home and checked (text).

Number of things confused. But I believed the book. I believed my neighbours.

The wrong kind of attention?

Fall from grace? The movie?

Imagine somebody made a movie of your life. Who would you get to pay you?

Gillian Anderson> desperate to play you.

Well, remember Moth was giving not long to live. Yet eight years later…

Success changes a person> she joins a band. 2025. Kickstarter fund. £12000. In words and music.

Books > to film. Very rare.

Storyline. Triumph over adversity. And very popular. Beautiful coastline. (set). How it looks. Existential crisis.

Backing and getting it made> budget around $10 million. Gillian Anderson. > director Marion Elliot?

Trailer released.

West Cornwall. Lighthouse Cinema. Regional premier. Radio interviewer. Moth wasn’t to be spoken to.

Number 2 behind Mission Impossible (Tom Cruise) Number 1.

Jason Issacs on One Show with Raynor.

‘You can’t hide behind a lie. It always comes out’.

Hemmings’ family.

Tom, the author that lived down the road. He writes a blog. We see him come and we see him go…People from their past where beginning to ask questions.

Author begins to deny allegations…

Here’s the clean, tracking‑free link to Secrets of the Salt Path, Episode 7 on BBC Sounds:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0n79zmk

Brain made of billions of neurons. When it goes wrong, devastating. July 2025> Moth?

i) Moth’s illness and how they lost their house> lies. (fiction). ‘as he fell into confusion and dementia and probably chocking on his own saliva’. CBD

‘That’s all it took’ (to cure him) ‘just a walk’.

CorticalBasilSyndrome. > CBS> affects movement. One side of the body to become quite clumsy.

Compare with  CBD (degeneration). What’s going on in the brain.

Moth struggled until we got to a little cove. Then we noticed he hadn’t taken his medication for some days.

19 years?

Comparisons> constant falls. Clumsiness. Alien hand that turns into a kind of claw.

‘Moth running up the path, holding the tent…He’d changed. And according to the doctors that wasn’t possible’.

Cf anna> official diagnosis 2018. Passed away 2022. But in those years she declined rapidly.

Third book. Landlines. She describes Moth falls.

Ruth Sabour> neighbour> We’d been told in 2021. Moth had been told by his specialist not much beyond this year.

Big walk 1000 miles from Scotland.

Old DAT scan showing ‘Normal reading’ after previous scan?

Normal doesn’t follow abnormal. Although we do know neuroplasticity does exist.

Specialist > exceptional cases 14-15 years> very rare. Affect speech and swallowing.  I’ve seen people with CBS and find out there is another cause. Not related. Not seen anyone. Maybe diagnosis isn’t correct.

Experience walking and nature can cure…

Dr Rickman. To the best of my knowledge… exercise doesn’t stop disease, but no  cure. No treatments. I wish there were. Progressive

Fed into idea that even those that are dying can wall thousands of miles. The Nature Cure. Will power is enough. Favoured by suspicion of DWP and politicians. Idea not trying hard enough.

‘I was writing an anti-recovery memoir’ Polly> mentoring programme with Penguin. Similar kind of thing. Has a nice time and gets better by swimming.

Raynor makes clear there is no final proof. ‘Something is true.’ Their truth.

A story about a story? Which story will people choose to believe.

Your truth of mine? ‘Her truth’.

Raynor Winn withdrawn from live appearances.

She was not alone in this story. Tim.

December 2025> Penguin makes an announcement> Her latest book is available. ‘Raynor Winn is on another walk…’ Alone. On Winter Hill.

No publicity is bad publicity?

Net impact> across sales> zero. (Richard Osmand).

Ruth Saborton. What’s more important? Money or truth?

Publishing accountable?

Hemmings> whether they choose to believe her (Sally Walker) or us. That’s fine.

She was questioned but not charged. (Raynor admits). It was a pressured time. She made mistakes.

What has gripped the nation by this tale?

Ruth Saborton, ‘I felt very foolish…it was really hurtful…I bought into the story.’

‘Gaslit.’

Claire read the book watching during her mum decline. CBD.

Julie and Dave’ pop up as their walking companions. Where are they? In Scotland and Iceland?

Firm ‘No’ to speak to journalists.

2026. On Winter Hill not available to 2028.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6