Citation Needed - The Salt Path

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

The Salt Path is a 2018 memoir, nature, and travel book by Raynor Winn. It details the long-distance walk along the South West Coast Path, in South West England, by Winn and her husband, Moth, after they lost their home, and Moth was diagnosed with fatal corticobasal degeneration (CBD). It deals with the theme of homelessness and the nature of home in the face of the unpredictability of life. It was shortlisted for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the Costa Book Awards, and won the 2019 RSL Christopher Bland Prize. A 2024 film adaptation of the same name has Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs in the lead roles. Some background events central to the premise of the book were disputed following an investigative piece in July 2025 by The Observer, which stated that Winn lost her home after stealing £64,000 from her employer, and cast doubt on her husband's diagnosis of CBD.[1] Raynor has since denied these claims and said she was taking legal advice.[2][3]

Hello and welcome. It's a citation needed podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be leading this hiking expedition. My trail name is pancakes, of course. And I'm joined by Selah, Cecil, Marsha, and Eli. Gentlemen, choose your trail handles. My alter ego having a nickname is one level too deep, man.

I'm sorry. I'm going to go with Cameron, trail cam for sure. Nice. I'm just going to stick with Marsh, but mainly as a warning about why you stay on the trail. Same reason. That's why I'm going by Skidmark. Perfect. All right, Marsh.

What person, place, thing, concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about today? We're going to talk about the salt path. Okay. What is the salt path? So the salt path refers to a couple of things, all of which I want to talk about today. It's the name given to the 630 mile southwest coast path, which takes walkers from the south coast of Somerset around Devon and Cornwall all the way to Pool Harbor in Dorset.

So it covers like the entire bottom left peninsula of the country as it juts out in the Celtic Sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. And which old guy walked it that you need to take down a place? All right. So this is like your tiny little version. of the Appalachian Trail without all the pesky mountain vistas on it. I got it. Okay. It is. It is. Yeah. So as well as being the UK's second longest national trail, it's considered one of the hardest to walk because it crosses a number of rivers, meaning that walkers have to ascend and descend at each river mouth, which means they climb a total of 115,000 feet as they do so.

That's four times the height of Mount Everest. I'll be it with better access to oxygen, fewer frozen corpses of overly ambitious Americans and marginally better weather. And for those of you wondering, the longest national trail in the UK is the trail of evidence between Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein. So that's a fun fact for your calendar.

So that's one, Sulpath. The Salfaith is also the name of the 2018 debut book from Rainer Wyn, initially written as a birthday present to her husband Moth after they decided to walk the entirety of the Sulf Altpath when Rainer was 51. The book was said to have started life as a memoir detailing their

journey, but then once she completed it, she decided to try and get it published. And so she called publishers at random until she got through to someone. And then it went on to sell more than two million copies. It became a Sunday Times bestseller in 2018 and the number one bestselling book in the UK for September 2019. It also won the author a prestigious 2019 award for older first-time writers, as well as nominations for the 2018 Wainwright Prize and the 2018 Costa Book Awards. The judges for the latter describe the book as, quote, an absolutely brilliant story that needs to be told about the human capacity to endure and to keep putting one foot in front of another.

Okay. It's like a really flowery description of a memoir about fucking walking. You just walk for laughs. I like that they have an own separate category for older authors. It's like, oh, you guys can do it too. Good for you guys. Well, the Salt Path is also the name of the 2024 movie adaptation of the book,

which starred Gillian Anderson as Raina Wynne and Jason Isaacs as Mothwynn. And it told a story of their famous and inspiring walk around the southwest coast. It was released in the UK in March 2025, with Raina Wynn giving press interviews and attending the premiere, telling TV cameras the experience was, quote,

almost unbelievable. And certainly the giant. journey that she and her husband had been on was incredible. From the rags of homelessness through to the riches of the millions of pounds that they made from her successful book series and major movie adaptation. Guys, marches for shadowing bullshit. He loves to say that something was almost unbelievable

before he tells us that it's bullshit. Yeah. I love when he slow walks the shitty person, though, and forces us to just make jokes about an inspiring old lady before he tells us that she's full of shit. It's my moment. That's when I know it's going to be fine. And like, whatever, fuck this lady.

This is how he should get us. He should just do an essay about a nice old lady who does a bunch of stuff and then three quarters of the way through, we realize. Well, look, it is easy to say why Rainer and Moth Story garnered so much attention and touched so many people. It's a debut book from a new writer who'd only just found her voice later in life. And someone clearly with a story to tell. And you can't deny, it is a great story.

As a couple in their 50s, their life was turned upside down in 2013 when a friend who'd persuaded them to invest in his business went bankrupt. And this so-called friend claimed they still owed him money, and he even took them to court to reclaim that debt. And as they were too poor to be able to afford a lawyer and terribly confused by the complex legal system, things looked bleak. And according to the book, they managed to find the single piece of paper that proved they didn't owe anything at all, but they submitted it to the court too late for the deadline. and the judge refused to enter it in the records. And as a result, the couple lost their cold case.

A lot of pumpkin magic in the legal system in the UK, I guess. Very much. So it's mostly like, yeah, it's mostly pumpkin-based is how we do things. The couple lost their case and the judge declared that they had to pay off their debt. And to do that, they'd be evicted from their 17th century farmhouse in North Wales. And as Rainer Wynne writes, they lost their home simply because their generosity was turned against them. There's the paper just sitting out and you see Potter from A Wonderful Life, put his hat over it to cover it. Not to be a pedant, but investing, like even if this story was true, investing in somebody's business isn't generosity unless you planned on losing the money. Right?

Right? Yes. Fucking Cylindra, right? Well, that worked out great, actually. We're so stupid. Well, it gets worse because two days after their home was repossessed, Moth was diagnosed with corticol-based. Degeneration. It's a rare and terminal

neurodegenerative disease. Can you say that without smiling? Because I can tell you're smiling right now. I just want to you to know. It's a rare and terminal neurodegenerative disease, which causes cognition issues and impaired movement. It's similar to Parkinson's disease. And typical CBD patients can expect to live around.

Typical CBD patients can expect to... He's going with Varses. He fucking made me doing a... No, I got it. I got it. We're in the bit where we pretend there's Sorry, sad. Typical CBD patients can expect to live for around eight years with symptoms getting more severe throughout that time.

And at the time of diagnosis, Moth had already been suffering with symptoms for between six and eight years. So the couple were understandably distraught by that. Moth. Don't go towards the light one. Bravo, man. I mean, at least you won't go straight towards it. Right. So, penniless.

homeless and now coming to terms with a terminal diagnosis, they decide to set off walking one of the most difficult hiking trails in the UK, armed with nothing but a cheap tent that they found on eBay and some old rucksacks. And along the way, in the book, they meet all manner of interesting characters. There are cafe owners and campsite owners who are too wrapped up in their lives and pettiness to offer a kind hand to a pair of down-in-the-look strangers. But then there are others who are welcoming and friendly. Rainer and Moth find themselves taking what little they managed to scrape together and sharing it with the other hungry and homeless wanderers that they meet along the way.

And in doing so, they realize their walk has given them both renewed purpose and vigor. And also, they find that walking 15 miles a day, up and down four times, the height of Mount Everest, is just what Moth needed to keep his terminal illness at bay. That's what all those corpses on Moth Everest thought too, buddy. So it was such a great story that Raina Wyn actually published two sequels to it about two other walks that she and her terminally ill husband decided to go on. There was the wild silence in 2020 and landlines in 2022, both written after the success of Slav the Salt Path.

In each of them, the pattern was similar. The start of each book finds Moth suffering really badly from a serious flare-up of the symptoms in his life-limiting terminal condition, only to find throughout the course of the book that connecting with nature and doing exercise and the spiritual journey of the walk is enough to restore his health

by the end of the book. Okay. Also, fun fact, the Appalachian Trail, it is littered with dead tumors. Oh, yeah. I was going to say, everybody, this is a great lesson. If you keep your lie about your walks

out of the realm of medical claims, Marshall will let you say whatever you want about what it did to your soul. It doesn't have to go. Google unless... Yeah, I mean, you think that, but I've already done Captain Tom, and he didn't say his walk was curing him. He just did it anyway. So Landlines, the third of those books, started a particularly bleak low in their lives, when Rainer and Moth were living and working for a while on a cider farm in Cornwall,

after somebody who read the salt path was so moved by the couple's journey that he invited them to stay in his farm while his wife was getting treatment for cancer. And in return for them helping him keep the farm's cider business going. And as Rainer describes in the wild silence, it was, quote, an incredible gesture by someone who read their story, which changes everything. And the couple spent four years living on that farm. And while they were there, they were even featured on a BBC cookery show fronted by the famous chef, Rick Stein, in which Rainer and Moth show Stein how they make apple cider. However, the couple... Do you just smash the apples until there's coming out? It's pretty much that.

Yeah, there's a lot of presses gone on. They actually do like a sieving through straw in an old-fashioned... Oh, there's a sieve. Okay, there's technology that I hadn't considered. There's a press. We'll come to the Apple Press. The thing is, while that was happening, the couple would then hit with a devastating new blow, because despite being an active enough cider farmer to have been featured on a BBC cooking show operating a heavy Apple press, Moth's degenerative condition was worsening. And in October 2021, he was told he wouldn't survive beyond Christmas. So, once again, the couple decided to leave the comfort of their new home and

set off on a long and arduous walk, this time along the Cape Rate Trail, the 200 miles of Scotland's remote bountains and locks. Hold on a second. I'm sorry. Fucking 200 miles? So she wrote a book about a world changing most of a fortnight. They're not even trying at this point. Fuck you, 200 miles.

Hey, the Cape Rath Trail is difficult. It's a difficult trail. Just not a very long ones. But I ask you, would you be a lot? Would you believe it, that walk along the Cape Rath Trail is exactly what Moth's health needed. Oh, amazing. Yeah. So as Raina writes in Landlines, quote,

After 200 miles of walking over endless headlands. Did not endless, there's only 200 fucking miles of them. Jesus. You just keep walking back and forth. Well, yeah, I guess you can make a endless. Is it like an MCSher headland? What the fuck is happening? Scooby-Doo pops out of one headland.

out of another. Goddell! So after 200 miles and walking over endless headlines carrying everything we needed to survive on our backs,

Moth's health began to improve in ways and should have been impossible. His gate became almost normal, his thoughts cleared,

his short-term memory sharpened, and movements that had been almost impossible before became easy, unquote. In fact,

when they get home from that latest walk, Moth sees his neurologist, only to discover that his terminal condition has apparently got better

because his brain scans now appeared to be normal. This is from Rainer Wynne, quote, what we're seeing are two sets of results. The old DAT scan showing an abnormal reading and this, the new one, showing a normal reading, unquote. I'd still rather die than go back to Scotland, Marsh.

Nice try though. So somehow, the irreversible damage to the very cells that make up Moth's brain had gone away. and if all of that sounds, as Raina Wynne put it, almost unbelievable, well, as we're going to see, there'll be a good reason for that.

Just Captain Tom at age 100 reading the book, pushing his walker up and down the driveway. These people are fucking liars. This isn't working at all. And of course, it's an episode of this show, so I'm thinking he's going to be right about that. We'll find out after a quick break. Mr. and Mrs. Weatherby,

thank you so much for coming in. No, thank you for seeing us. I must say, I was terribly moved at your story. The things you and your husband have overcome, incredible. It's been quite a journey. Indeed it has. But I would like to make that journey a bit easier. You still need a place to stay?

I'm afraid we do. And I'm assuming you're still both out of work. Indeed, Henry's care requires quite a bit. Well, how about we solve both of those problems today right here in my emerald mine? Here, sir? Yes, all my employees live on premises. You'll have a job, food when your payload is sufficient, anything you need. Well, yeah, but I don't think Henry is quite up by emerald mining.

Oh, don't be silly. We have children who work here. You'll do what you can or you'll get the whip is what we always. say. You know, we actually started to go fund me for our medical bills? No, no, no, nonsense. A couple dollars here or there isn't a sustainable way to give.

I want to set you up for life. In fact, most of my employees work here until the day they die. Did children do? Everybody. Oh, got it. And we're back.

And we're left off. Lacebo effect was working muracles as usual. Okay. March is going to fuck it up now. What's next? So as you may by now have guessed, this story isn't quite how

Rainer and Mothwynne described it. But for one thing, there's no such person as Rainer Wynne or Mothwynn. Yeah, the books were written by Sally Walker about walks that she says she went on with her husband, Timothy Walker. They'll go on to say that Rana and Moth were just nicknames that they'd always gone by

with Moth actually being short for Tim Muffy. Come on. Literally nobody can find anyone who ever called him that, and zero people in history have shortened Timothy to Muff. Of all of us lapping off either end of our name for a nickname, Keith being named Eat is probably the most on point. I like that. I like that.

And Eli takes the L. So doesn't it feel like... So I'm not taking that. Doesn't it feel like they made up a lie about walking and then realize they should change the name from Walker to whatever. Like that one, they didn't say their nickname was Wynn or anything, but I'm willing to forgive them for that.

Like, that's just one step shy of being named Sally Fourth, right? Yeah, no. Heath, it's adorable that you think that's why they changed their name. We'll find out why they changed their name. Oh, got it. Okay. But crimes, probably lying fraud, something like that. There's a lot of that going on, yeah.

So much of what we now know about the real story came after an extensive investigation by Chloe Hajimothay, at The Observer, starting with that initial unfortunate plunge into homelessness. So to hear Rainer, or rather Sally, tell the story, their own kind-hearted generosity led them to invest in a doomed company. And then somehow that doomed company going bankrupt meant that they owed that company more money and that was secured against the house and that's how they lost the house. That isn't the whole story. The debt they owed to that company. It wasn't so much due to a bad investment as it was more

a repayment of money that Sally had embezzled from them. Okay, hold on, you say tomato. I say embezzle. It's a different. Sally Walker had been a part-time bookkeeper for a small family-run estate agency in North Wales. When the owner of the business, Martin Hemings, started to notice that money had gone missing. When he looked at the company bank balance, he realized that when Sally had been asked to deposit cash into the bank account, she'd clearly kept at least some of that for herself.

And over a few months, he found out she'd stolen £9,000 from the company. Hey, embezzling, that's just like, hake some, right? So as I got a plan. Once discovered, Sally offered to pay back the £9,000. And Martin Hemans agreed, partly because he'd known Sally for years, and also partly because he figured that might be the only way he'd get to see that money again. But before she did pay him back, he decided to just give those books another audit for the previous years and found that the sums weren't off by £9,000,

she'd actually embezzled £64,000 from him. So, Hemings at this point, called the police, and Sally was arrested and taken in for questioning, before being released pending a further police interview the next day. Except the next day, Sally Walker was nowhere to be seen, and neither was her husband, Timothy Walker. Check the salt path. You know, I get it.

On the Lamb is technically homeless, though. I feel like if you make a deal to pay someone back for embezzling, and then they go and check the books to see if you embezzled more. They're the one who breaks the deal. Their grandchild should still be able to inherit that money. It's his now. So they'd actually fled overnight to stay with relatives in London, where Sally confessed her crimes.

And their relatives hired a solicitor, who arranged a deal for Sally to pay back all the money she'd stolen, plus all of the legal costs, as long as Martin Hemings agreed not to press charges against her, and as long as he signed a non-decent. disclosure agreement. And the closest anyone in the Hemings family got to breaking that NDA would be after the salt path was published and after Martin Hemings had died.

Because whenever his daughter would see copies of the saltpath in charity shops and secondhand shops, she'd write a note in the front cover explaining who Sally really was. Dear leader, she is a big fucking faker. Yeah. Can't help pictures. Her hands all blue with ink from this big long thing that she's left in there. she sets it back in, she's like, got her.

So it was actually Sally's relatives who'd loaned her the money to pay Hemings back. And with the legal fees for all the stuff around the NDA and stuff, her debt was now £100,000. And that was being charged in an interest of 18% a year by her family, suggests they may have known her a little bit.

And the farmhouse was being held as collateral. And a business did actually go under, but it was in 2010 when her relatives business folded and that debt that she modem got passed on to the creditors who then decided to recall the loan. Sally and Tim refused to pay up. In 2012, they found themselves in court, now owing 150,000 pounds, which they didn't have.

And they were told if you fail to pay that within a year, your house was forfeit. Oh, so we lose our homes because of your bad decision and our crimes, but Bitcoin really great. Now, at this point, you might be thinking you know the rest of the story. They failed to pay. house, they got the bad news about Timothy's medical condition, and then they set off on their journey with Sally, eventually writing the book that won her all those accolades and all that fortune. That's not how it went. Their first attempt to pay back the lawn involved them setting up their own publishing company in 2012 called Gangaarni Publishing, which would only ever

be responsible for one novel. How Not to Daldi Deer, which is Welsh for Stand Firm, How Not to Stelden Firm, and it was written by an unknown writer called Izzy Wyn Thomas. So it's weird then. Is the key to have your house repossessed because of the fraud you did and then you can't stand firm on that list? It shouldn't be really hard to stand firm then. Well, the book actually does detail a lot of the things that Sally did but makes it seem like it's fictional. So it's actually a pretty good account of her actual life better than salt path is in many ways. Wow.

But it's weird than that years later, she'd say she had no idea how to get the salt path published, despite her actually owning a publishing company. But a bad one though, right? So it could still be technically true. I don't know what I'm doing here. Yeah. So that Izzy Winn, Thomas book, could only be bought directly from the Gengarni website rather than from any bookstores or anything like that. See what I mean?

But the walkers, yeah, but the walkers did say that anyone who bought a copy would then be entered into a prize draw where they would have the chance to win a 17th century farmhouse in Northwest. Amazing. Sally and Tim's house. Yeah. The house that was about to be repossessed if they didn't peer back the lawn that they took out to avoid Sally being charged with fraud.

Turning your debt into a raffle isn't a modern problem with a modern solution. That solution's called Trump coin. Or collateralized debt obligations. Speaking of fraud, the prize draw promised entrance that the farmhouse was offered free of mortgage or any other legal or registered charge, which wasn't true given that the court case was about to repossess it. But it doubly wasn't true, given that the couple also had. had a mortgage of $230,000 to pay on it. So it was a house that was at least £380,000 underwater, which was more than it was worth at the time.

Okay, well, it's better than Trump coin. Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. I also love that they, I know it's a lie, but I love that they said it's offered free of mortgage. Because could you imagine, like, you win a raffle and you win the house, and they're like, there's a mortgage, though. You got to pay, pay the mortgage. Surprise.

What is this? Oprah's Cars? You win Eli's credit card in the wrap. So given all of that, you might wonder why this unknown writer called Izzy Wynn Thomas would allow herself be wrapped up in such an obviously shady deal as this. And the answer, in case you hadn't already guessed it, is that Izzy Wyn Thomas doesn't exist. She was the pen name of Sally Walker. So the salt path is therefore not actually Salazar. She's first novel, despite her claiming during interviews that it was the first thing she'd written since she was a teenager leaving school, and despite her entering it into an award for best debut book by a new writer, which she won and won money on. I'm honest. I'm just surprised they didn't steal Izzy's book for this.

There's a deeply tragic hilarity to being in touch enough with the human condition to write two award-winning books, but not to stop robbing your family, right? So, yeah, this wasn't her first book, and they weren't made homeless by the unfortunate consequences of their own generosity. There are questions as to whether they were actually made homeless at all, given that while they did have to give up

that farmhouse in Wales, they did actually still own property in France. Huh. Property they bought in 2007, not far from Bordeaux. Oh, for fun. Yeah, okay, well, the word homeless isn't great. I get it.

Like, they were unfarm housed, right? They were like people experiencing on farm-housness. And okay, the one in France, it was a modest property, but given that they'd stayed there in the past, it was presumably preferable to being homeless, except their neighbors were some of Tim's family, which might explain why Sally and Tim weren't keen to go set up their home there. Because according to allegations from Sally's niece, after Sally had been caught stealing money from her employer, Timothy's parents also found that they had much less money in their accounts than they expected, which is odd because Sally was the one who usually handled that sort of thing for them.

And when other family members actually looked into it, it turns out, Sally had stolen 25,000 pounds from them too. The good thing is that she donated that stolen money to modest needs so Keith could buy a charcutory board. It was like the whole thing. I bet at one point she tried to tell them that only stealing 25K was generous compared to what she usually did. This is the family rate. I'm giving you guys the family rate. Taking it easy on you. Well, we do know what you told them because when that theft was discovered, Sally sent the family a letter explaining, quote,

please don't look any further for the money. I've taken it, all of it. I have to ask you not to take things any further with the bank, but just tell them it was a mistake. I have a police record and should this go any further, I will go to prison this time. And amid panic when the mortgage was threatened to foreclose, I transferred 25,000 pound from Tim's mom's and dad's account to, Tim's account. Now, Sally denies sending that letter, even though multiple newspapers have now seen it. And also in the years since Sally made millions from

her story, she never bothered trying to repay that debt back. Jesus Christ. Yeah, the newspapers all saw that letter. It was a, she actually signed her name in the bottom of a silhouette of a girl. I don't know if you saw it. She might have paid them back if Tim's family hadn't been such fucking snitches about it. She said, don't snitch.

She said don't snitch. the letter she said that she said they might not have snitched had she paid them back that's the other thing about it oh you just love to blame the embezzler criminal don't you marsh I can already tell who side she wasn't a first time writer they weren't screwed over

and they weren't homeless but did they actually walk the salt well don't do this much is a qualified maybe so we do know they were there for at least part of it because they're not the only people to walk that trail and not even the people to have documented their time on the trail.

So other people met them along the way. And there are blogs where other walkers referencing, there are blogs where other walkers reference meeting a couple that arguably match Sally and Tim. Yeah, lots of people getting embezzled on the salt baths in their blog. Yeah. Matching their description at this point would just mean stealing somebody's shit, wouldn't it?

So unsurprisingly, Sally's written encounters with the kind-hearted ramblers and the petty business owners that they make along the way, do not stand up to scrutiny at all. There's tales they tell of inspiring a young waiter to stand up to his mean boss who'd been yelling at him to stop being so lazy and to sweep the floor. And so the kid makes them both a free pinini

and then quits and locks the cafe up and drops the keys in a letterbox. The thing is, Sally named the town that the cafe was in. And these are small towns on the south coast or the southwest coast. So you can easily find the exact place and the exact cafe and it's nothing like they describe.

There's no young wait to ever quit like that. There's no, there's a carpeted floor so you literally can't sweep the floor. There's no paninis on the menu and never have been. There's no letterbox for you to drop the key in and nobody but the owner has ever been able to lock the cafe up. But everyone in the town does slow clap a lot, so they got that one right. There's a place where they claim to attend the pub quiz at a pub that doesn't do a pub quiz. Okay.

Okay, but that's because they won it so hard. Yeah, no one ever could be a champion again. So good at it. Also, they tell of being chased out of a campsite by like a box-ticking bureaucrat who is angry that they were refusing and were unable to pay. But in reality, that campsite is run by a hippie who lives in the teepee with an off-the-grid lifestyle. He's got a policy of letting charity walkers stay there for free already. Sorry, they said my name was Montague Burns the Campsite Magnate and that I'm yellow? There's the simpsies.

They're doing the simsons. God, the next thing you're going to tell me is Sally didn't really talk to any ex-presidents that wished that they had bombed Iran. Well, then there's the time they meet the arrogant rich guy that they call Grant, who only offers them help because he mistakes Moth for the poet Simon Armitage

and invites Moth into his home, where apparently there were, quote, three beautiful women who flutter around Moth, offering him a massage. But the real Grant, who, in reality, his name is Warren, remembers meeting them, and the only woman who was present at the time was his autistic son's childminder, which is a very different picture to paint. Yeah, sure is.

Also, just about nothing. Sally just gave a press conference about a casual email to Galane Maxwell. That doesn't mean they were friends. What's so insane about this story is that they were under no obligation to turn the actual people they met into villains, right? The book is a one long anti-dedication page. Sounds like it, yeah. That's the only way they can make an interesting story out of it to win awards and win people's hearts is by lying about every aspect of it.

That I get. Well, off the point, Sally writes that she and Tim walk the first half of the path, like 100 miles, while eating almost nothing, like actually detaining their daily meagre diets of just packets of noodles for the walk. But experienced walkers of the path, including those that wrote the definitive guide. book to the salt path have questioned whether anyone, even in very good health, could have walked so far and so little sustenance. Right. Exactly. And plus, how could she be generating this much shit if they weren't eating a lot of fiber? You'd be surprised. So at the end of their walk, Sally says that they stopped to stay for years at the cider farm, where they could live as apple farmers while Sally wrote those follow-up books. Now, we know that's true, not least because the couple

were part of that BBC cookery show with Rick Stein, where they showed him how to make cider. But even that, as it turns out, was just an insanely high-risk lie from the couple. So Sally and Tim were only invited to stay on that farm after the owner, a guy called Bill, read the salt path and felt bad for their plight. Bill's wife had cancer, so he had to move out of the farm to be closer to her in a hospital, so he asked Sally and Tim to move into the farm for minimal rent if they kept his cider business going and he'd pay them to do that. Except they didn't do that.

According to Bill, pretty much the only time they ever made any cider while staying there was while the BBC were there in late 2020, filming the famous author and her husband

showing how they make their cider. As a result of their refusal to do the work that they were there to do, Bill's cider business stopped making cider and the orchards all fell into ruin

while his farm was just hemorrhaging money. Shell is like, well, yeah, actually, I'm rich enough that I don't need to embezzle from you now. And honestly, we thought

these apples would be a lot lower on the trees, so we're going another direction, and I want you to respect that. And it was while living at Bill's farm in October 2021, but Tim, aka Moth, received that devastating news that he only had three months left to live.

And Bill was heartbroken when Moth told him that. It's part of the reason he didn't hold what was happening to the farm against Sally and Tim. Clearly, they've got bigger concerns given Tim's poor health. But it wasn't until Bill read landlines in September 22 that he learned about how that long Scottish walk had actually completely cured Tim, which is odd because Tim hadn't said anything to his good friend Bill about no longer being on death door. Oh, my God. Bill just throws an apple at Moth and Moth catches it.

Ha-ha! Neurons are fine, you fucking gold bricker I do. And so we come to the last shoe to drop, because this not first time, non-memoir about a couple who weren't actually screwed out of their savings and weren't made homeless from their not-only helm, also may not be about a man who received a terminal diagnosis. So, as I said at the start, Sally and Tim claim that in 2013, Tim received a diagnosis of corticorbitizal Degeneration, or CBD, which is a severely debilitating neurodegenerative disease. Also a great, very real product that Marsh won't let me sell you in the ad break.

No, I will not let you scam people, Eli. This essay is an evidence to that. I couldn't even do that long an essay about all my scams. So, sufferers of CBD often experience tremors or they lose control of their arms or legs, and many have difficulty speaking, and many even suffer dementia. There's no treatment. Patients usually survive for around eight years from diagnosis, and the last few years of those usually require round-the-clock care. By 2013, according to Sally, Tim was already something like six to eight years into having symptoms. And by the time of the BBC interview, in which he was amateurishly making cider for essentially the first time ever, while showing zero symptoms of ill health, he'd been living with a diagnosis for nine years and apparently living with symptoms for 15. He's also undertaken several walks of hundreds of miles in length, including one that required him to climb elevation equal to four Mount Everest.

I had SIDS when I was a kid, too. I got better, but... I check your privilege, Cecil. I've been suffering from SIDS for. 15 years. So how do the couple explain this? Well, Tim doesn't. He's actually been extremely reticent to speak in interviews for years now, which you could either attribute to him not wanting to expose the speech issues that he suffers as a result

of his condition or possibly to expose the lack of any speech issues he's suffering 15 years into this condition. You know, he tried to fake it for a second and it went so badly. And he was like, no, I have to not. After not. Yeah, 100%. You do the RFK voice. Let's see if they notice if I do the RFK voice. But this is the thing. He does talk extensively and without any issue at all in that

2022 BBC side of making sure where he can also be seen tramping happily through the fields and picking apples and looking heavy buckets of apples around and operating a heavy apple press. He's just got a mouthful of apples the whole time so he can't talk right. He's just chatting about what he does the entire time and sharing little tidbits about how the machines that he's only just seen for the first time, basically, how they work. And if you didn't know that he definitely had a serious and terminal neurodegenerative issue, you'd never have guessed it, even if you were a specialist in diagnosing CBD. Okay. Well, if you'd done your research march, you would know that Apple Fever is actually the final

phase of CBD. So journalists investigate in this story, has spoken to nine different CBD specialists, and none of them had ever seen a. case anything like Tim's, and they'd certainly never heard of it being reversed by walking through nature. And how does Sally explain things? She said, quote, we do know that neuroplasticity exists, although we know very little about it. We used to think the earth was flat. We used to think no universe existed beyond our own, unquote. Now, it's unclear whether by we, she means mankind, or just specifically her and Tim, but it is worth noting that neuroplasticity requires

neurons, which were the very things that are degenerating in patients with CBD. Okay, give it a few months. They're going to say it's a GLP1 doing its magic because it cures everything. It's impossible. Hey, forgive me if I'm derailing us into the thing that just I'm the only one who doesn't know, but are, are there universes beyond our own? I feel like I would have heard that we knew that. Maybe I, maybe I could buy a ticket to one. Yeah, right. So we do know at least that Tim does have a diagnosis of CBD, because, because in response to questions raised by the investigations into her claims, Sally published four letters from doctors to Tim,

dating back as far as 2015, the first of which suggesting that he might have CBD and therefore more tests are required. But he even says in that 2015 letter, if he has it, it is a very mild form. And interestingly, 2015 is two years after Sally claimed

he received that terminal diagnosis in the salt path. Yet this letter is still exploratory. Well, sometimes doctors like to ease you into it, Marsh, over many years. Oh, yeah, especially for conditions that kill you in eight years. Yeah, no, it's really slow walk that. The other letters that she presented, there's one from 2019 saying his case is atypical and stable, and one from 2025, which is a summary of a video call that he had with the doctor who said his case was unique and extremely indolent. Now, notably, at no point has Sally or Tim shared any confirmation,

of the terminal diagnosis, nor of the warning that he had three months to live in 2021, which is the kind of letter that would have put all of these questions to bed. So make of that what you will. What we can say is that if Tim did receive a genuine CBD diagnosis and not a misdiagnosis, which he quite literally ran with, then he's got a case so unique it confounds every expert who's ever treated a CBD patient, which at the very least is something. something that Sally and Tim should have mentioned before their story was being turned into a Hollywood film featuring Lucius Malfoy and Dana's Sculling. But then, maybe if they'd done that, none of that money would have come rolling in, which kind of feels like the point here.

Sure does. All right, if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? If you're going to commit theft and fraud, maybe don't let them make a Hollywood movie about your cover store. Keep it low. And are you ready for the quiz? I am, but if I get the answers wrong, I'm going to blame the terminal disease I just decided I've got. All right, Marsh.

What British uplifting story are you going to ruin next? A, digging up Haddington Bears 2009 anti-trans tweets, B, telling make-a-wish kids that wishes aren't real. C, explaining detailed aerodynamics equations that show Mary Poppins could not have in fact flown, or D. Revealing that Prince. Andrew had a very legitimate reason to be on that island. Okay, I'm going to go secret answer E.

Just wait until November when I tell you how we honor our war dead here. Oh, good one. All right. I got a question for you, Marsh. Given that the salt path is 630 miles and the path at the center of landlines was only 200 miles. And the one at the center, I looked at us up, of the wild silence is a measly 34 miles. It's a long fucking weekend. What other books did she have planned for later in the series before you fucking skeptics found her out?

A, that time Moth's migraine eased off after a bit of mall walking. B, that time the two of them didn't realize how far apart those two casinos were based on the map. C, that time she started to do Relay for Life, but then that was a whole thing, so she changed her mind. Or D, a crossover where she challenges Captain Tom in a race to his mailbox. Okay, I'm going to go D because I think Captain Tom beat her, but not when she writes about it. He actually caught her digging in her mail. She was in his mail at the time. Okay, the path between two casinos is an MC Escher path.

It's insane. It's insane. It's a lot. All right, Marsh, it seems like all Sally really ever did of note was betray the people who trusted and hoped to help her. But at least she didn't what? A. steal Marsh for a podcast when we very clearly had dibs on him

B miss a bunch of episodes so your wife could get plastic surgery on her head or whatever he's doing I don't know what's paying attention Steve Steel Cecil for fun buddy trips to places or D cheers me that one time

Cheers to you okay we're gonna go to Scotland with Mars and Nickette too I know it's amazing so it can't be D because I can't tell if that's me or Noah because I think we probably both hit you at least one time So I'm going to go A because Cecil didn't steal me, we were always best friends. Oh, wow.

I think Eli just killed himself. He's going to cry. He's going to cry. Give him a second. Everybody listen. No, you have to move forward. That's the rule of comedy. We're talking about what a winner Eli is.

Cry. Eli, you're the winner. You talk now. Yay, I win. He's lost. Who's up next? Amazing. Eli, he's up next?

I said Cecil. Okay. All right, well, for Marsh, Cecil, No, and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Cecil will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive dissonance, the no-rogan experience, fear old dads, god off movies, scathing atheist, skeptocrat, and D&D minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get to touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com. Well, now, how are you two holding up? Please, sir. My husband is going to starve to death. Better not do that with your shoes on.

It will draw a dick on your forehead. You will? Yeah, it's a fun prank we do here at the Emerald Mine. To the dead. That's what I said, yeah.