Who Trolled Amber? - On the path | The Walkers Ep2

Episode Date: January 13, 2026

With question marks now raised over how The Salt Path began, Chloe Hadjimatheou starts to track down other characters from the book. Did Raynor Winn and Moth ever walk the path the way they claimed?Subscribe to Observer+ on Apple Podcasts and Spotify to binge listen to the entire series on Tuesday 13th January.To find out more about The Observer:Subscribe to TheObserver+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentHead to our website observer.co.uk Credits:Reporter - Chloe HadjimatheouAdditional reporting - James UrquhartProducer - Matt RussellMusic supervision & sound design - Karla PatellaExecutive Producer - Jasper Corbett Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Observer. If you're going from St Ives to Land's End and Penzance, there's a lot of narrow paths, scratching ghost bushes, lots of ascents and descents, and they can be quite hard work. When Rainer Wynn set off to walk the southwest coastal path, she chose to bring one book with her, Paddy Dillon's Little Brown Guidebook. It's got a waterproof cover and an ordnance survey map,

and it's the perfect travel companion for a couple wanting to navigate a mammoth walk along the cliffs of England. If it's lashing with rain, blowing a gale, it's quite stressful and takes you longer than you think it's going to take. The south-west coastal path has ascents and descents totaling more than 35,000 metres. Paddy, one of Britain's most prolific outdoor writers, knows it better than most. Apparently, it's the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest four times. When I was younger and fitter, it took me 28 days, and we are now on day 49 for me. When I got in touch with Paddy, he just happened to be editing and updating the same book that Rainer Wyn and Moth followed

when they left their life behind and hit the hills. Like Rainer Wyn, I wanted to start with an easy bit, so I caught up with him on the very last day of the walk, from Swanage to South Haven Point in Dorset. This one is really quite easy, especially the very last part. to the end. There's definitely something about the path that attracts people who want to conquer the odds.

Paddy tells me that when he was in his late teens, he did a whole section of the walk surviving on one loaf of bread and a jar of strawberry jam. Rainer Winn and Moth managed to walk the entire coastal path on barely anything more than super noodles, crackers

and the occasional bag of chips. You can go for some days on a rest of. restricted calorie intake, if you like. And then it gets dangerous. You're actually destroying proteins to survive. And that's when you are literally doing yourself major damage. The thing that makes this even more astounding

is that not only did Rainer and Moth walk the 630-mile path in two long chunks across successive summers, quite an incredible feat given that most people will spend years walking little bits of it at a time. But they did it while Moth was extremely serious. sick. He has corticobasal degeneration in a terminal neurological disease, and this is really the magic of the salt path, the redemptive arc of the book, because the walk fixes him. At the start of the book, Moth's struggling to put his coat on and he needs help lifting his rucksack onto his back, but then just over halfway through the book, Rainer tells us something happens.

After we'd walk to prefer quite a few weeks, maybe a couple of hundred miles. She started to notice his footprints in the dust were just a little more even and then it all sort of culminated in one night on a beach. They've pitched their tent too close to the tideline and in the middle of the night they wake up to find the seas come in. In all the chaos, Moth grabs the tent and carries it up the beach over his head. It's a deeply moving moment in the film of the salt path when they both realised the walkers had a profound effect on his health.

Leave the tent! I'm not leaving it! It's where we live! Look at you! I think there's a huge, powerful shift that happens in your body, actually, when you're living that way for a period of time. How can I describe it? It's really, it's like a sort of like strengthening in your body that it's hard to describe,

but I noticed it happened in my mind. Moff overgoes weeks. The salt path isn't just a story of a walk against the odds. It's the story of a walk overcoming the odds. Walking that path allowed Moth to reverse a degenerative condition. Rainer and Moth tell us that it literally helped him cheat death. Moth, you've got this terminal illness, is it? Yes, it is.

But I'm still going strong thanks to walking the coast path. But you can't walk yourself to wellness if you haven't done the walk. Given the fact that Rainer's already been caught out lying about the reasons why they had to take the walk in the first place, the way they lost their home, is it possible she might have lied about the very premise of the whole book, the walk itself? And if she did lie, then what does that mean for Moth's health condition? There might be a way to find out because along that walk, Rainer and Moth made it. dozens of connections with people they met along the way. Raina tells us in a disclaimer at the front of the book

that the names of real people have been changed to protect their privacy, but I wondered whether there might be a way for me to trace them, fellow homeless people, hikers, locals, all sorts. And if I found them, would they be able to vouch for Rainer and Moth's version of events? Would they be able to tell me whether or not they ever did the whole walk? As I set out to trace this couple steps from the book to hunt for the characters written into its pages, I found myself pulled along a new timeline, one that writes a very different story to Raina Wins. I'm Chloe Hedermotho and from Tortoise Investigates and The Observer, this is The Walkers.

Episode 2 On the Path. It's hard to explain how obsessed by. people have become with trying to find out whether aspects of the salt path are true or not since my revelations about the story last summer. Reddit and other online platforms are full of this stuff, but the biggest community is on Mum's Net. There's a huge forum there. I worked out there's almost a thousand posts per thread and there are dozens of threads. I posted a while back an inconsistency with the book chronology and real chronology, particularly around the fact that it can be deducese.

I'm still a bit confused by what happened between 15 September 2013, selfie at Land's End, and the start of Tim Walker's H&D course in September 2015. And it seems low protein diets can also decrease pro-inflammatory cytokine. Nearly 20,000 separate posts written by members of the public in their attempts to work out the truth behind the salt path. Over the last few months, I found myself sifting through hundreds of messages while trying to pursue my own leads, trying to piece together the puzzle of how much of the salt path is true.

Some of the people posting on Mum's Net were also sending me emails. One of them was a man called Jonathan Dutton. He was contacting me almost every day, sending me messages like, bizarre story involving turkeys being shot at Christmas on pheasant shoots on the Clevelia Estate. I contacted somebody on the Clevelia State to ask about the likelihood of this having occurred. They thought it was highly unlikely. And also things like... Which suggests that some of the walk might have been completed well after October 2014.

On page 254... If I'm honest, I was pretty wary of him at first. Why was he sending me all this stuff? And what did he want from me? That's a good question. And it's a question my wife often asks me. She's been tearing her hair out over the last few months at the amount of time I've dedicated to trying to analyse the truth in the salt path.

Jonathan is so dedicated to his mission of unpicking the book that he flew from France where he lives to London to meet me in person at the observer offices. So I was actually saying that I imagined your house to be like one of these serial killer sort of layers where you've got all these pictures up on. on the wall with the red string attached to them all. Unfortunately, I share the office with my wife.

Okay, so she has not have found that acceptable. She has prohibited that entirely. It turns out that Jonathan is a hiker and also a real-life sleuth, the 21st century Hercule Poirot. So I really enjoy solving puzzles. My father was a great crossword puzzle expert. He used to get to the national finals every day. He used to complete the Times crossword in five minutes.

So I've kind of followed in that family tradition without wanting to sound pompous. Jonathan's retired now, but he used to be a kind of detective for a living. First investigating companies in Asia to check whether they had overvalued themselves. And then tracing people who'd been left money in a will, but who had lost touch with their families. So when he read my article in the Observer, it reawakened the Sherlock Holmes in him.

I thought to myself, hmm, that sounds rather like there are some skeletons in the cupboard. Like me, Jonathan realised that the salt path served as a kind of witness statement. A catalogue of the events Rainer Wynn claims really happened to her and moth. And like me, he wondered whether the lies they've told about their origin story might extend to the very backbone of her book, the walk itself. According to the salt path, Rainer and Moth set off along the coast in the summer of 2013. They take a break for a few months over winter, staying with a friend called Polly, and then they finish the walk around September of the following year.

This is a map of the southwest coast path, and attached to it are photographs from Raynor Wyn's Instagram feed, which we have located at various points of the southwest coast path, based on the account in the book. And so the photographs, you geolocated them, or were they labelled on Rainer Wins? So they were labelled on her Instagram feed, and also I was able to do some research

and ascertain where they were. Jonathan's been trying to piece together as much evidence as he can gather to verify whether the walk happened, as Rainer says. Using photos Rainer has posted online, he's been focusing on the kind of open source intelligence that analysts use to track real-time attacks in Gaza and Ukraine. The apples are shown on the tree. That suggests that this was taken as claimed in the book sometime.

The reason why I think that they walked at least some of the path in 2016 is that if you look at the clothing that moth is wearing, he has wearing a pair of put a date on each of these photographs. One of the reasons why I think this photo dates much later from possibly September 2016 is that the rucksack, Reynolds rucksack, the bottom of it is yellow. But most of what Jonathan was finding was speculative. I needed to speak to the real people Raina Wynne says she and moth met along the way. Some had begun reaching out to me directly, others I'd have to track down.

I was finding lots of small leads that showed discrepancies in the story. Like the actors from an open-air theatre, Raina says they attended at the Minak. I spoke to some of the cast who said details in her description couldn't be true. She described an actor missing his lines because he was on his mobile phone. There's no reception near the stage, they said. Rainer and Moth get a lift in a van full of actors still in costume. No way, I was told. They always leave their costumes at the theatre

and they absolutely wouldn't have given Moth and Rainer a lift in a production van. Totally illegal. Just wouldn't happen, they said. Then there's the pub in Westwood Ho where Rainer and Moth join in with a pub quiz. Turns out the only pub in Westwood Ho fitting that description has never hosted a pub quiz. I spoke to a campsite worker with blonde dreadlocks who caught the couple staying overnight without paying.

Rainer says he accused them of space theft. and she called him a shell of laid-back hippie call but underneath a frustrated box ticker. When I find this guy, he tells me he's called Tadge. Tad, it turns out, lives in a teepee off-grid and he makes his living these days by teaching people to forage for food in the woods. Space theft isn't in his vocabulary. And he definitely doesn't come across as a box ticker to me.

There are so many of these instances. where there's a grain of truth with a mound of fiction surrounding it. Then one day an email appears in my inbox. Hi, Chloe, it says. I'm writing on behalf of Warren Evans, the founder of Warren Evans' beds and mattresses based in London. It's regarding the duck paw scene in the salt path. Oh my God, so nice to find me neat.

I have a Warren Evans bed at home. Never in a million years could I have imagined that this bedmaker was a character in the salt path. I want to say, hi Grant, or hi, Warren? Yeah, Grant, I think, you know, I've forgot my sandals. Warren thinks he is the character Grant in Rainer Wyn's account of her coastal walk. Back in 2013, when he was at the peak of his business success, he rented a house, a picturesque, shabby-sheek-star cottage off the South West Coastal Path in Cornwall.

They spent the summer there, his wife and personal assistant, but also the nanny who was helping look after his autistic son. Taking a walk along Duckpool Beach one day, he comes across a couple of bedraggled-looking walkers, and when Warren reads the Salt Path book years later, it brings that summer all back to him. It sounds like me right from the get-go. They've had a hard walk on it.

It's a steep walk. Everyone walks up and down it, I go, well, hey, I bet you'd fancy an ice cream, you know. Bet you'd like an ice cream? The gravelly voice drifted over us like a wave of tormenting flies. This is Raina Wyn, reading her own words from the audio version of the salt path. I'm renting a farmhouse, about 20 minutes away. Come on camping the orchard.

We sat in the back of Grant's sleek four by four as he drove inland through the shade of high hedges. I always help people when I see them. It's not even just helping them, it's just to invite someone back for food when they are hungry or have a shower if you've got a shower. and I don't have that fear that humans are going to somehow I don't have an issue of vagrants, just for starters, you know. Warren's originally from the US, raised in a Quaker family,

and charity comes very naturally to him. So when he came across a couple of exhausted-looking walkers on a beach, it wouldn't have felt strange for him to invite them back to his place. They had lasagna, and she had a shower, and he probably did too, I would have thought. Then they would have sat around by the table. They stayed in the orchard and then had bacon sandwiches in the morning. But the book had embellished this story quite a bit.

My name was Grant, so it's changed. Not wearing any more. Weren Evans? Nope, Grant. I turned up with these white socks with sandals and a sunburnt, bold head. And it made me laugh. I said, I sound like a right idiot. What he thought was less funny was Rainer's description of the third.

three women who were with him, his wife, his PA and the nanny. So the description in the book, at least, I have to say it's sort of almost pornographic. Three extremely sexy women who sort of surround Moth and flutter around him and take him off into another room and begin massaging him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bond hair swished around Moth as she slid her hands over his shoulders and started to massage his back. He never had a massage. My PA was not a masseuse at any point of life

And certainly our autistic son's childminder Was not going to go and massage somebody else's feet No way She cut her hands off before touching another man's feet In the book, Reina says The reason they get given this special treatment Offers of food, showers and massages Is because they've mistaken moth

For the poet Simon Armitage They want to take photos and be associated with a celebrity Did you know who Simon Armitage was? No, but no, I don't know who he is. We do love reading, but not poetry at all. It's never been my thing, so no. I was insulted by that. Insulted because it diminished Warren's generosity

and it made him out to be self-seeking. But worse than that, Rainer says Grant claims to be a self-made businessman when really he was handed everything on a silver platter. He's lied to himself about his origin. story, she tells us. I've lost my house. I've been homeless. I've lived in squats when I was young. I've lived in these railway arches for eight years from my son when I was a single dad then,

six years. And I know it's like to have nothing. Because I started with 600 pounds in the basement in Clarkinwell when I was 17. Warren doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on all this. He doesn't feel the need to tell everyone he meets. He's only telling me to set the record straight. You'd think that she might at least having gone through this, terrible situation she went through, have some of the humility, to now be more reflective and remember the kindness. I don't mind it. I don't need her praise or thanks, but her reflection

on it, she still has a very them and us attitude, it seems, and a very kind of righteousness. Warren points out an aspect of the book I'd never noticed before. Rainer presents the love that she and Moth share as something that elevates them, and she uses it to look down on other. who have more material wealth than them as being somehow spiritually poorer. She really loves her husband and she could rather die and be without him. But other people love their husbands and wives too,

and it doesn't have to be so excluding. She doesn't have to dislike the wealthy, but she doesn't have to dislike my wife and the child minder and that just because they are pretty women. She might be more forgiving and kinder to other people. Rainer's unflattering in her, descriptions of so many of the people she meets along the way, even the homeless, people she

and Moth should have felt an affinity with. At one point, she speculates that one beggar must be a public schoolboy, an atonian. So I say, I think they're very unlucky. They're very, very, very unlucky to have such an unkind way of looking at others. Memoir never promises to be the world as it really is. What we're buying into is the world as seen through the author's very particular lens on events and people. In that respect, Raina has the right to paint the picture of people as she sees them, whether it's kind or generous, it's her view. But lots of the story about Grant is simply made up. The massages, being mistaken for Simon Armitage, none of that is real. And it does feel like she crosses the line from memoir into fiction here.

In terms of the walk, though, Warren says he did meet Rainer and Moth in the summer of 2013. So it seems they were on the coastal path when they claimed to have been. Did they do the whole walk as described? Well, that's where things get tricky, because not long after my investigation was published, I got a call. Do you mind just if you start again because it's on the lizard and it's called It's Mollion Cove and it's the Mollion Cove. Everyone knows it's a Molling Cove cafe. It's been in the same family for almost 80 years.

Yeah. Joanna who runs it at the moment, her grandmother opened it. They're an amazing family. So Rana went there. Although she's not Rana, is she? One rainy day, about halfway through the Salt Path narrative, Rainer and Moth stumble into this busy establishment on Mullian Cove Beach. A man in his 20s weighted tables, cleared tables, politely dealt with grumpy customers,

cooked cakes, swept the floor, helped old ladies to their seats. The weather's miserable and a downpour has drenched them. So Raina says they shelter in the cafe and sit there, people watching. The owner came in. What the fuck do you think you're doing? There's two tables out there, unqueathed. What do I pay you for? You're fucking crazy.

The kind waiter can see that Rainer and Moth are starving, so he hands them a pinnini each, telling them not to worry about paying. And then he tells them he's decided he's quitting. He finishes cleaning, closes the place up, and posts the key through the letterbox before walking away triumphantly. Also, Rainer Wynne tells us, except... There's no... letterbox to put the key back through.

There's no floors to be swept because it's carpeted and always has been. A member of staff would never have been left on their own to lock up by themselves. You're in the family, I've never had a member of staff walk out. Paninis were never on the menu.

So, almost none of the details Raina describes are true. Bonnie's worked as a waitress at the cafe for years. She says she almost didn't take the job because friends of hers who'd read the salt path warned her it must be a terrible place. It took me seconds to work out

that no one would have spoken to anybody like that in the Moline Cove Cafe. There wasn't a male owner. There's certainly no mail that would have come in and spoken to staff like that. They're a wonderful, wonderful family. At some point,

after she started working there, Bonnie realised that customers were probably staying away because of Rainer's description. So she tried to contact the author to set the record story. try to make contact via Raina's agents through their website to explain the situation. All I wanted from that was an apology for the family. I did not get a reply from her agents or from Rainer.

The Myllian Cove Cafe scene. None of it's true. Did Rainer and Moth ever even stop there? A dozen miles away and just a few pages on in the book, Rainer and Moth are at another cafe. This was not the Cornwall we knew. Lush, warm, sheltering, welcoming. We couldn't afford to stop at the Fat Apples Cafe,

but the name got the better of us. And only says you're walking. Where are you heading? Two Australians sat down at our table, followed by two mounds of all-day breakfast. One each. I tried not to breathe too deeply. The smell was so good.

Rainer doesn't tell us much about this Australian couple, except that they can afford big breakfasts that Rainer and Moth are I jealously. And that they aren't the same hardened hikers. The Australian lady tells them, We've camped and done hotels to here, getting cold ago. So B&B all the way for us now. Falmouth next.

Drop the tent in the charity shop. Then I'm going to go hairdressers. Got to get my roots done. At this point in the salt path, it's the end of September 2013. Except it's not. Rainer Wyn's not been honest about when this will took place, and we know that because the Australian couple are real. They're called Joe and David

Parsons, and they really did walk the South West Coastal Path, and they remember meeting a lovely couple, Sally and Tim, as they called themselves. The Parsons posted about them on a blog they kept about their walk, and the post describing that meeting is dated 2015, two years after the Salt Path says they met. August 8th, woke Sunday to Drusely Rain, managed to pack and walk to the Fat Apples Cafe in Porthello for a magnificent breakfast. Here we met Sally and Tim who were walking the path in the opposite direction. What a lovely couple who had a very sad story to tell, but we think we inspired each other. The sad story the Parsons heard was that moth was unwell.

And they had shared their own story too because David Parsons had suffered an injury which kept him off work and eventually cost the couple their dream home in Australia. Since then, they've lived in a van. Then, back in 2015, a close friend of theirs found out he was dying of cancer, and they'd taken the radical decision to fly to the UK and walk the coastal path in his honour. They did the whole thing in one go, hardly ever staying in hotels, and they certainly hadn't given their tent away. Then, one day in 2018, the Parsons picked up a magazine.

to see Sally and Tim looking back at them. So they reached out with an email. When we saw the picture of you both in the article, we kept looking at each other saying, that's Sally and Tim. But it can't be, as you would have told us, you were homeless, and you said you were walking the other way. And why did you give yourself fake names?

Or did you reinvent yourselves while on the path? Would love to know. Raina replied, she told them, that she and Moth had decided to redo the walk in 2015 and that they felt the book would have been complicated by such details. The two couples had had so much in common, the loss of a home and how illness had driven them to the coastal path, but the salt path somehow misses all of that out.

All that's left is this sense of a shallow lady pretending at hiking who actually can't wait to get back to civilisation. But if Rainer and Moth met Warren in 2013, then they were at very least doing the first stretch of the walk that summer. Then, if they met the Parsons two years later, in the summer of 2015, they couldn't have done the whole walk in 18 months as they claimed. The gap between the two is just too big. Meanwhile, Jonathan Dutton had been digging and looking for other bits of evidence.

He'd been pouring through Rainer's connections on social media, and he noticed something I had too. that Rainer's son was a prolific Facebooker. His timeline provides some useful dated posts, like one from September 2013 when he talks about giving his parents a lift to Bristol, right smack bang during the time when they were apparently walking on the coastal path.

How could they be in two places at once? The son suddenly deleted a number of incriminating Facebook posts in the days that followed the investigation, including two comments, which led one to believe that the narrative in the salt path was perhaps not entirely accurate. And there's another post from July 2013. That's right at the time when his parents were being told

they were having their house repossessed, and crucially, right when his dad, Moth, was apparently being told by his doctor that he was dying. 23rd of July, just been teaching my dad, how to surf. Today's been a good day. Going surfing with his dad, Moth, right after we're told he received his terminal diagnosis. And there's something else too. So much of the detail from the first half of the walk in 2013.

All those people I spoke to, the Parsons, the Mullian Cove Cafe, Warren, so many more. They're all from the first part of the walk. There's far less from the second half. of the walk, which they claim they did the following summer in 2014. Jonathan had been sifting through how many words and how detailed Rainer's descriptions were of one half of the walk compared to the other half, and he found that huge swathes of the second half of the walk were just skimmed over. Almost two-thirds of the book focuses on just the first third of the walk.

What is strange is that the stretch from minehead to land's end is described pretty accurately. On the other hand, the stretch from Land's End to Pool isn't described very accurately at all, so it's roughly 350 miles from Pool back to Land's End. All these things feel very bitty, little anecdotes, but cumulatively, taken all together, they seem to add up to something bigger. The story of the walk is full of holes. Perhaps they walked parts of it. Maybe they never did the whole thing at all.

The walk, which is the very beating heart of the salt path, is not the unflinchingly honest account its publishers promised. And if they didn't walk the whole thing in the way they claimed, then how is it possible that the walk cured moth? I'm still going strong, thanks for it to walk in the coast path. I was able to tie my boots after a few weeks. Your footsteps in the sand were just in a straight line. This ultimately is the offer of the salt path, hope and redemption against all odds,

but also the belief that if you fight hard enough, and if you cling to true love and to nature, that it is possible to reverse the irreversible. The problem with writing a successful book is that suddenly everyone knows who you are. And when you keep writing successful books that make increasingly startling claims about miraculous recovery, from death, well, then you can be sure that people are going to be watching you. Neighbours, wondering, why is the moth in Rainer Wyn's books so different from the moth they're seeing in the flesh? Coming up in episode three. He was saying how he felt about them and he was getting a little bit suspicious about them.

He was like meeting a rock star. He had so much presence. He's a handsome man. He's got piercing eyes, chock of white hair. and he's warm and friendly and talkative and a great raconte. I sat opposite Moth and he broke the news. Bill, the doctors have told me not to plan beyond Christmas. The more I read, the more confused I was.

I just couldn't understand it. Lots of things that didn't add up. Rainer Wyn responded to the observer's investigation with a following statement. The salt path lays bare the physical and spiritual journey Moth and I shared an experience that transformed us completely and altered the course of our lives. This is the true story of our journey. On her website, Raina goes on to say,

The Salt Path is about what happened to Moth and Me after we lost our home and found ourselves homeless on the headlands of the South West. It's not about every event or moment in our lives, but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope. The journey held within those pages is one of salt and weather, of pain and possibility, and I can't allow any more doubt to be cast on the validity of those memories or the joy they have given so many. Thanks for listening to The Walkers, The Real Salt Path.

It was reported by me, Chloe Hajimuthé, with additional reporting by James Urquhart. The series producer was Matt Russell, music supervision and sound design was by Carla Patella. Series artwork by Lola Williams. The editor was Jasper Corbett. Thank you for listening to The Walkers. We hope you're enjoying the podcast so far. You can listen to all seven episodes today by subscribing to The Observer. By subscribing, not only do you get all our podcasts before anyone else,

you also get access to our premium food and puzzles newsletter, exclusive offers from our partner Mubi, free tickets to our events and much, much more. Subscribe today at observer.co.uk slash subscribe or via the link in the show notes.