“A breathtaking starting point for a book,” mentioned NRC Bestseller plot The Salt Path in 2020. “Especially if you know it is not made up but the actual, hopeless situation.” The ‘true’ story of two people in their fifties who lose their house in Wales, after being cheated by a good friend, was already sold two million times in book form worldwide and simply turned out to be too good not to film. The film can be seen since the autumn of 2024.
From one day to the next Raynor Winn and her husband Moth, both in the fall of their lives, end up on the street. A childhood friend of Moth convinced the couple to invest in his company. If that company goes bankrupt, and then managed to hold the childhood friend Moth liable in court, Raynor and he will lose their house. With no red penny in their pocket, they decide to take a walk along the rugged British coast, appointing on their tent. And all that while Moth is terminally ill. While walking, the couple regains the connection with each other and with nature, and Moth changes from a beaten dog with a terminal disease back into the vital, resourceful man he was ever for that bad luck. It is not surprising that the film, with Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, also received rave reviews.
But it all turns out to be too good to be true, discovered the British weekly magazine The Observerin one on Sunday article. The circumstances under which the two come into financial problems are in reality very different from the book and film. The magazine interviewed eight people with knowledge of the financial problems of author Sally Walker, as Raynor Winn actually turns out to be called, and her husband Tim.
’64 .000 pounds stolen ‘
According to The Observer In the 2000s, Walker took around 64,000 British pounds of the company where she worked as an accountant. If a declaration is made, she flees under a false name and lends money from a distant family. It offers the company to repay all the money and to cover the legal costs, if the company did not start a lawsuit and the owner signs a confidentiality agreement. The owner of the company, who died in 2012, finally agreed, his wife now tells The Observer.
If the company of the family member from whom the couple borrowed money goes bankrupt, the creditors approach. The judge decides that if the money is not paid, the house will be seized. Both Sally and her husband Tim have no work at that time. The two set up a publishing house. Anyone who buys the only book published by them directly from the publishing house can participate in a draw with a special prize: the house of the couple in Wales, on which will be seized within a few months, but they will not tell the latter. What happened to the money that the two earn with this is according to The Observer Unclear.
All this does not alter the fact that it is tragic when a couple ends up on the street and is forced to wild camping. But that is not the whole truth either. Since 2007, the couple has had a piece of land with an old, dilapidated stone house in France, where the two regularly stayed in a caravan, discovered The Observer.
Doubts about disease
And Tim Walker’s terminal disease (Moth)? He would live for eighteen years with corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare condition in which parts of the brain damage and die, somewhat similar to Parkinson’s. Patients often lose control of limbs, their speech and eventually get dementia. At diagnosis, life expectancy is six to eight years. Walker does not seem to experience visible symptoms. Nine neurologists and researchers who spoke The Observer are therefore also skeptical about this part of the story.
The long walks along the British coast would make the symptoms disappear. Wonderful, also acknowledges Sally Walker in the books. Neurologists say that the disease described in the books and interviews with the couple is ‘a breath of fresh air’, although medical miracles are not impossible. A charity that focuses on the disease made a video with Tim Walker offline after asking from The Observer.