This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
I never read The Salt Path, because if there is one thing I hate more than inspirational tales of love and loss, it is powerful stories about adventure and survival. I was fascinated, though, when the Observer alleged that the best-selling non-fiction book about a couple hiking through the grief of homelessness and disease was not quite as “non-fiction” as people had assumed.
The Walkers is a podcast from Chloe Hadjimatheou, who reported on The Salt Path for the Observer (for which she was recently nominated for a Paul Foot Award). It makes for terrific listening.
In The Salt Path, Raynor Winn’s husband, Moth, has been diagnosed with an aggressive neurodegenerative disease. Their home has been repossessed. Homeless and grieving, Raynor and Moth decide to walk the 630 mile South West Coast Path. Sad, yet ultimately triumphant, the book was like crack cocaine for vaguely existential bourgeois British bookshop-goers.
The book sold more than a million copies and inspired a film adaptation starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs. According to Hadjimatheou, though, the house had been repossessed after a chain of events that had begun with Winn embezzling tens of thousands of pounds from a former employer. Hadjimatheou also cast doubt on Moth’s disease, having consulted various neurologists and researchers.
Winn has dismissed the alleged embezzlement as mere “mistakes”, whilst protesting against the “vile, unfair, and false” suggestion that Moth’s disease was not as bad as she had written.
In The Walkers, Hadjimatheou interviews — or discusses interviews — with people who have known the Winns (previously known as the Walkers, hence the title).
She talks to family members of the man from whom Raynor is alleged to have embezzled money, co-workers who were baffled by Moth’s less than clearly visible condition, a relative of Raynor’s who has what appears to be a confession to misbehaviour (Winn disputes this) and many others.
It is extraordinary how much chaos the Winns are alleged to have left in their wake. It makes me think about how many other Winns there might be — at the centre of storms of local controversies, without bestselling books ever giving them national exposure.
The Walkers was produced by Tortoise Media — which celebrates “slow journalism” in the face of the madness of the news cycle. This “slow journalism” is often very dull, but The Walkers is a fine example of the form.
Its narrative unfolds gradually, without being tedious — full of interesting detail. It is a gentle hike but also a fascinating one.
It seems a bit too earnest. Don’t get me wrong: there is a lot of sadness in the story of the Winns and The Salt Path. There is alleged theft, betrayal and embarrassment. But behind the bleak narration and the sad piano chords is an element of farce, in the attempt to turn what is alleged to have been a series of venal follies into a heartbreaking tale of pain, freedom, nature and enduring love.
In 2006, James Frey’s bestselling addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces was exposed as being full of lies. Years earlier, though, in a devastating hatchet job, John Dolan of The Exile had shown the book to be so sentimental and contrived that people who were taken in by it had to look within themselves to find an unwitting accomplice to Frey’s deception.
Opening The Salt Path, having listened to the podcast, I couldn’t believe that people hadn’t asked questions earlier. The whole book reads like it was written with one eye on a future Hollywood adaptation. Take this, as the couple are hiding from bailiffs:
As we crawled from the darkness beneath the stairs, Moth turned back.
“Together?”
“Always.”
Cut!
Someone who took this completely at face value should interrogate their own sentimentality.
In March, Raynor Winn admitted that she had published a novel in 2012 under a pseudonym. This was problematic because she had claimed that The Salt Path was her first book and had even accepted £10,000 prize for a debut novelist or non-fiction writer. Her next book, On Winter Hill, has now been delayed.
I didn’t finish the podcast fully understanding what Raynor and Moth Winn had and had not done, or what might have been motivating them. One thing I will say for them, though, is that they do at least seem to be as close as The Salt Path suggested — rampaging across middle-class rural England with the conspiratorial intimacy of Bonnie and Clyde. Perhaps, despite their improbable worldwide fame, no one really knows the truth about their experiences but them.
“The crazy thing is that [Raynor and Moth’s] real story is intriguing,” says Hadjimatheou. Absolutely. At the risk of being presumptuous, I would like to address Mrs Winn: write a really honest book.
Write about you and your husband’s most shameful secrets. Tell us how you really feel about your critics. For all the cynicism that I ’fessed up to at the start of this piece, there is something irresistible about stories involving lovers taking on the world. And they don’t have to be wholesome. Real life rarely is.
