Were they EVER really homeless? Concerning new questions about the Salt Path couple and the best-selling memoir that’s made £3million

Not even the most ferocious Atlantic sou’westerly could have prepared Raynor and Moth Winn for the storm that blew into their lives this week.

Raynor’s award-winning memoir The Salt Path, an ‘unflinchingly honest’ account of how she and her ‘terminally ill’ husband lost their home to creditors before setting off on a 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path, has been one of the most successful literary phenomenon of recent times.

Published by Penguin in 2018 and, along with two sequels, selling millions globally, a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs is currently in UK cinemas.

But last weekend, bombshell allegations cast doubt on this enchanting retelling of the couple’s journey of self-discovery. It was, at best, a ‘misrepresentation’, at worst, a fabrication. Amid damaging claims that 62-year-old Raynor stole thousands from a former employer, questions have also been raised about Moth’s debilitating neurological illness which also lies at the heart of the book.

Raynor has called the allegations ‘grossly unfair’ and ‘highly misleading’. While not denying the alleged embezzlement, in a statement this week the former bookkeeper cryptically referred to ‘mistakes’ made in the business where she once worked.

But an exclusive Mail investigation now raises further questions about how she and her husband, 65, came to be homeless back in 2013 – not to mention their journey along one of the UK’s most challenging and breath-taking coastlines.

‘I think they wrote the book as a way of making money and it just blew up on them,’ an acquaintance told the Mail this week. ‘They just didn’t think it was going to get this big and invite all the scrutiny it’s now got.

‘I’m hoping they come out and tell the truth, but they are the type of people who, if they say something to themselves enough times, will believe it till their last breath.’

The Mail has spoken to relatives, friends and business associates of the Winns – whose real names are Sally and Timothy Walker – to piece together their troubling past.

We have visited their associates in Cornwall and travelled to France to speak to neighbours of the ramshackle home they bought in 2007 by remortgaging their beloved Welsh farmhouse – something else Raynor failed to mention when she wrote about the couple’s homelessness.

For the first time we can tell the full story of the couple and the chaotic events which led to their eviction from their beloved ‘forever’ home and their walk along what this week was cynically dubbed ‘The Pinch of Salt Path’.

At the dark heart of their real-life story lie claims of betrayal and a bitter family row over money in the midst of the 2008 economic crash, the fall-out of which impacted others, too.

Among them is widow Ros Hemmings, who told the Observer newspaper last weekend that Raynor – then known as Sally Walker – had stolen money while working as a bookkeeper for her late husband Martin’s estate agency business in Pwllheli in Gwynedd in 2008.

Mrs Hemmings, 74, crossed paths with the Walkers while volunteering at Plas Yn Rhiw, a 17th century manor house on the Llyn Peninsula where former plasterer Tim Walker – Moth is an abbreviation of Timothy – was then working as head gardener.

He and Sally had met as teenagers growing up in Burton upon Trent, Staffs, before moving to Pwllheli with their daughter, Rowan, and son, Tristan, in the early 1990s and turning their farmhouse into a dream home. Tim’s parents also moved there.

Explaining how her husband came to offer Sally a job at his company, Mrs Hemmings said this week: ‘She’d been made redundant from a hotel where she worked in Abersoch and it was at the same time as my husband’s bookkeeper had retired.’

A former customer told the Mail: ‘She [Sally] would be the first person you dealt with if you walked into the business. She’d be on the ground floor, taking calls and receiving visitors. Martin would often be out on jobs or upstairs. He was as honest as the day is long.’

Alarm bells rang when Mr Hemmings noticed that Sally had failed to deposit a large sum of cash and discovered around £900 was missing. When confronted, a source told the Mail, a tearful Sally ‘apologised profusely’ and agreed to pay the money back.

When the Hemmings’ accountant later realised that, in total, around £64,000 had been taken, the police were called.

In the statement she released this week under her alter ego, Raynor Winn, Walker did not deny the embezzlement claims but said that ‘for me it was a pressured time’ and also ‘a time when mistakes were being made in the business’. She added: ‘Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry.’ She did not say what those mistakes were.

Mrs Hemmings’ solicitor told the Mail this week that Walker manufactured invoices and paid them to herself. But Mrs Hemmings last night told a paper that Walker was writing cheques and faking her husband’s signature.

Why she needed the money is unclear, but visitors to the Walkers’ home were struck by the lavish renovations, including expensive slate floor tiles and a new powder-blue Rayburn stove.

Walker admitted this week that she was questioned by police but said: ‘I was not charged, nor did I face criminal sanctions.’

According to the solicitor, Walker was ordered to appear at the police station the next day but didn’t show up and her abandoned vehicle was later found 50 miles away.

In fact, the Mail has been told that for a few days Tim Walker had no idea of his wife’s whereabouts and, fearing she might harm herself, travelled to the Isle of Skye, where the pair had married in 1986, to search for her. But she had gone to London to visit Tim’s wealthy uncle, a man identified by the Mail this week as property investor Anthony Browne.

Browne died in 2016 but his widow told the Observer that her husband arranged a deal under which he would lend Walker the money to repay the sum she had allegedly taken from Mr Hemmings. Consequently, the Walkers borrowed £100,000 in the form of a ‘repayable on demand’ loan from Browne’s company, secured against their home with a punishing 18 per cent interest rate.

Mr Hemmings, who died in 2012, agreed not to pursue criminal proceedings after Walker offered to repay all the missing money and cover his legal costs.

One of his associates said this week: ‘Martin was such a nice guy and he didn’t want the police to prosecute her.’

According to Walker’s statement, in the early 1990s her husband had invested in Anthony Browne’s property portfolio but when it was due to mature, Browne claimed the investment had failed.

She adds: ‘However, we later discovered this was not the case. When we raised this with him, he conceded and, although he couldn’t at that time, he promised he would eventually pay us back.’

That was the money, she said, she requested in 2008 to pay back Mr Hemmings.

Failing to explain why she needed to pay anything, she said: ‘I reached a settlement with Martin Hemmings because I did not have the evidence required to support what happened. A part of that settlement was that I would pay money to Mr Hemmings on a ‘non-admissions basis’.’

Presumably desperation explains why, if this was money she and her husband were legitimately owed, she also agreed to put up their home as security. When Anthony Browne’s business went bust in 2010, his loan to the Walkers was transferred to two men to whom he owed money.

The Berkshire-based commercial property investors then took the Walkers to court in 2012 when they failed to repay it.

One of them, 71-year-old Christian Martin, told the Mail this week that in reality he and his partner had ‘never got anything out of it’ because after the mortgage was paid off, there was no equity left. ‘It was meant to be worth around £300,000 but they eventually sold it for around £200,000,’ he said.

Mr Martin added that his wife had read The Salt Path with her book group. ‘I had no idea it was anything to do with what happened 15 years ago,’ he said. ‘Life is sometimes stranger than fiction. I was just a passive investor at the time.’

Whatever the truth about how they got into such trouble, the Walkers’ desperation as the financial net closed in on them is clear.

In 2012, a year after repossession proceedings had begun, Tim Walker set up a company called Gangani Publishing.

The plan was to offer free raffle tickets to anyone who bought a copy of a 255-page novel written by Sally Walker under the pen-name Izzy Wyn-Thomas.

Titled How Not To Dal Dy Dir [meaning stand your ground in Welsh], the plot is a fictionalised retelling of the Walkers’ own lives and their financial struggles.

At £7.99, or £5.50 for an eBook, the plan was to sell a staggering 250,000 copies while offering their home as first prize, as a way to settle their debts.

A promotional online message said they were ‘trying for’ Welsh actor Rhys Ifans to draw the winning ticket in the ‘absolutely genuine’ raffle.

Walker said this week that the raffle ‘was a mistake as it clearly wasn’t going to work’. After cancelling it, she said, the couple refunded ‘the few participants’.

Within months the Walkers would set off on the walk which would ultimately turn them into multi-millionaires.

But claims that they were genuinely homeless were called into question this week as it emerged that Tim Walker’s parents also lived in Pwllheli at the time.

And, despite losing their Welsh home, they still owned the doer-upper they’d bought in south-west France, just a few miles from a magnificent chateau belonging to one of Tim Walker’s brothers and next door to a pigeon tower owned by his younger sibling.

Said to be worth between 20,000 and 35,000 euros, neighbour Nathalie Duparant says the Walkers visited in 2004 during a trip to see Tim’s brother but they returned only once, in 2007, to stay in a caravan parked on their land.

Local mayor Serge Cadiot told the Mail that some time ago he had pursued the couple for unpaid taxes relating to the property but letters had been returned unopened.

Walker said this week: ‘We have never lived there, that would be impossible and we haven’t been there since 2007. The insinuation that we were not homeless, the central premise of the book, is utterly unfounded. Nor do we owe any council tax in France.’

According to the book, the couple’s ‘Salt Path’ trek began in August 2013 when they set off from Minehead in Somerset equipped with a tent bought on eBay, two sleeping bags, £115 in cash and a bank card to draw out £48 a week in tax credits.

At this point, the couple’s son, now 36, was living in Newquay in Cornwall. Curiously, on July 23, 2013, just a couple of weeks before the Walkers set off, he posted on Facebook: ‘Just been teaching my Dad how to surf today has been a good day.’

In the book’s description of their preparations, Raynor makes no mention of a visit to Newquay.

As for Moth’s health, she suggests that at that time he could barely walk.

According to the book, he had just been diagnosed with terminal corticobasal degeneration (CBD), an irreversible condition that causes severe mental and physical disabilities. Life expectancy for sufferers is six to eight years.

PSPA, the only UK charity dedicated to CBD sufferers, this week announced it has terminated its relationship with the couple saying ‘too many questions currently remain unanswered’.

Since then, the author has published excerpts from two clinic letters relating to her husband’s treatment which she claims show ‘he is treated for CBD/S and has been for many years’. In the earliest, dated 2015, a consultant neurologist summed up Tim Walker’s symptoms, which were said to have started in 2005 and affected the left side of his body.

The medic, whose name is redacted, concluded: ‘I have explained to Mr Walker that his condition most closely resembles the corticobasal syndrome . . . but it is clear that he is affected very mildly, especially given the long history.’

A 2019 letter, also from a consultant neurologist, stated that his symptoms had led them to ‘formulate’ his condition as an ‘atypical’ form of CBD.

According to The Salt Path, the walk took the couple through Newquay, where they arrived in early September and visited a soup kitchen before camping on a headland. Again, there is no mention of them meeting their son who, one imagines, would have been only too happy to help them on their way.

After all, just nine months earlier, on the brink of losing their house, his cash-strapped parents had given him a lavish gift.

Posting on Christmas Day 2012, he wrote: ‘I can’t believe my parents got me a holiday to Rome for Christmas [smiley face emoji] best Christmas EVER.’

Very generous – but exactly how the couple could have afforded such generosity in the midst of their legal and financial meltdown is unclear.

According to The Salt Path, the Walkers reached St Ives in mid-September, before rounding Land’s End and walking until the end of the month. But according to their son’s Facebook posts, on September 17 they met up.

He posted: ‘3.5 hours to Bristol 30 mins break then floor it back fun times . . . dropped my parents off heading back now.’

From that it would appear that in the midst of the walk his parents had, for some unknown reason, strayed from the coast path.

Like so much in the couple’s telling of their life, the book came about by lucky accident.

Fearing her husband’s condition meant he was forgetting their journey, Sally, made notes along the way and then typed up their story and presented it to Tim for his birthday.

Their daughter urged her to get it published. In 2017 she submitted an article to the Big Issue and, her confidence boosted, she started Googling literary agents and ended up with a book deal with Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin.

As an unknown, her advance would probably have been less than £30,000. But the book, written as Raynor Winn – a combination of her own and her mother’s maiden names – and its two sequels, The Wild Silence and Landlines, both of which lean heavily on the couple’s original story, have been best-sellers. As well as winning prestigious awards, they have sold more than two million copies in English and been translated into 25 languages. And Walker has already received a hefty advance for a fourth.

There would also have been income from eBooks, audiobooks, foreign rights and speaking appearances.

It’s estimated the UK sales alone brought in £9.5 million and industry insiders estimate the author’s total earnings would be at least £3 million, but could be substantially more.

The film adaptation of The Salt Path, for which Walker is a co-producer, could also have seen her pocket anywhere between £500,000 and £1 million.

Walker said this week that since receiving her advance for The Salt Path she had been settling debts ‘and now believe I have tracked down and repaid everyone’, she wrote.

Still, the couple have seen their lifestyle dramatically improve since the book came out seven years ago.

After finishing their walk they settled in a flat in a converted Methodist chapel in the Cornish village of Polruan.

According to Walker’s telling of the story, they bumped into the owner of the property by chance after sitting beside her on a bench towards the end of her trek and she offered them her flat to rent.

The couple moved to a larger property in countryside near Lostwithiel, Cornwall. Yet again, that was apparently all down to good luck and a wealthy benefactor who approached them on Twitter asking if they would move into his disused farm and oversee a rewilding project.

He is understood to be multi-millionaire investment banker turned cider maker Bill Cole. Mr Cole declined to discuss the couple this week, but a source told the Mail that the relationship between them had deteriorated after the Walkers moved in.

Quite when they moved out is unclear. The couple are understood to now be living in a property on the Lizard Peninsula, along with their daughter, a 34-year-old tattoo artist. It is unclear whether they purchased the property or rent it.

Whether The Salt Path phenomenon can survive this ongoing saga remains to be seen.

This evening Sally Walker was due to appear on stage in Liverpool, performing alongside a folk band in a ‘prose and music collaboration’. The band will now perform alone.

Penguin, which says it ‘undertook all the necessary pre-publication due diligence’ on The Salt Path, announced this week that they, and Walker, have decided to delay her fourth book, saying: ‘It is our priority to support the author at this time.’

Walker declined to comment when approached by the Mail this week.

It is not the first time the publishing giant has faced difficult questions about the veracity of the work of one of their authors.

Famously, Belle Gibson, an Australian wellness influencer, who claimed she had triumphed over terminal brain cancer through natural remedies, had a cookbook published by Penguin in 2014.

Within a year journalists revealed that Gibson had never been diagnosed with cancer, and her claims of charitable donations were unfounded.

Author and literary agent Andrew Lownie says it can be difficult to spot untruths from authors, but he is surprised that no one picked up holes in this story. ‘It does seem extraordinary, given how well known the story was, that it has taken until now for it to come out,’ he said.

He added: ‘It is embarrassing, trust has broken down, there may not be grounds to cancel the new book, although I suspect the lawyers will be scouring the contract to see.’

But Walker remains unbowed: ‘As our walk along the Salt Path taught us, when life has ground you into the dirt, you need to stand up, turn your face into the wind and continue unafraid. So that is what I must do.’

Such writing has undoubtedly fuelled the middle-class fantasy of escaping the grind of the nine-to-five and living a simpler life.

But the key question now is whether that fantasy can survive the gritty reality now thrust in front of our eyes.

• Additional reporting: Ross Slater, Stephanie Condron, Rory Mulholland and Nick Craven