The Salt Path couple's house is crumbling like their reputation

Times

a day ago

In Le Village du Dropt in the southern French countryside 60 miles from Bordeaux, surrounded by fields of unharvested sweetcorn, stands a grey stone house almost reduced to rubble.
The ruin became the subject of international intrigue last weekend following an excoriating investigation into an unlikely subject: a memoir of loss, illness and hope. The Observer claimed that the international bestseller The Salt Path was 'spun from lies, deceit and desperation'.
Raynor Winn's debut tells how she and her husband, Moth — their real names are Sally and Timothy Walker — embarked on a 630-mile walk along the South West Coast Path after becoming homeless and almost penniless when their 17th-century 'forever home' in north Wales was repossessed. Their desperate circumstances were compounded when Moth received a debilitating diagnosis, but the harsh winds and salt spray on the footpath from Somerset to Dorset eased his symptoms.
After the book was published, and again after the eponymous film starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs was released six weeks ago, the couple received an outpouring of adoration and support.
Now they are mired in controversy centring on claims that Winn embezzled £64,000 from a former boss, Martin Hemmings, who died in 2012. Hemmings reported the missing money to police and Winn was arrested and questioned but not charged. The newspaper's investigation also cast doubt over the nature of her husband's rare neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration (CBD).
It also referred to the Le Village du Dropt property, pointing out that the Walkers owned it despite being penniless. The report said that local French officials, and letters sent to the couple's former home, suggested they owed tax on the property.
On Wednesday, Winn, 63, published an impassioned 2,300-word statement rebutting the majority of the claims, describing the report as 'highly misleading'.
Following questions about its description of the book as 'unflinchingly honest', Winn's publisher, Penguin, said it 'undertook all the necessary due diligence' and it had a contract regarding factual accuracy. On Friday, it announced the publication of her fourth book, On Winter Hill, had been delayed because the allegations caused her and her husband 'considerable distress'.
While fans around the world picked over the claims and split into loyalists and refund-demanding defectors, the seven residents of Le Village du Dropt were bemused to find their tiny world featured in the exposé.
They are usually outnumbered by the animal population of the village — three geese, two donkeys and at least four dogs, including an inquisitive tricolour Bernese mountain dog. This week, they have been more than outnumbered by British journalists searching for answers about a woman who has become one of the country's best-known authors.
Among the residents is Sean Morley, 40, who is originally from Brighton and bought the property next door to the Walkers seven years ago when he decided to trade cloudy English weather for the French sun.
Morley, a chef who works in the town of Eymet and said he had never read The Salt Path and did not plan on doing so, said that interest in his neighbours preceded the Observer investigation. 'Every year, the mayor comes round and asks me if the owners of the building have returned. Everyone's been trying to find them because everyone wants to buy the house,' Morley said.
The mayor of the commune Pardaillan, in which Le Village du Dropt is located, declined an interview.
The Walkers' presence in the area began in the early 2000s when Moth's brother, an author who lives in a chateau in the south of France, bought a rectangular chimneyed pigeonnier, or dovecote — buildings that were used historically to attract pigeons and doves as a source of meat for wealthy farmers.
In 2007, Moth bought the house on the land adjoining the pigeonnier, which used to be the home of the village notary. He paid for it 'by remortgaging our home, to prevent a developer buying it', Winn said. The setting of rolling hills and sweetcorn fields has drawn artists and authors from around Europe, including the late Oscar-winning French film-maker Marguerite Duras, Morley said.
It is not known how much the couple paid for the property, but Morley estimates it is worth as little as €20,000, based on recent house sales in the area. 'That will be cheap as chips to buy now, but it's not worth a penny unless you invest to do it up,' he said.
The wall of what might have been a living room or kitchen is a gaping hole trestled by vines. Bricks that used to belong to the roof overhead are scattered across the broken floor. Overgrown thorn bushes crowd collapsed stone steps leading to the entrance of the property. In Winn's words, it is an 'uninhabitable ruin in a bramble patch'.
The author said: '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.
'We did try to sell the land after the economic crash in 2013, but the local agent said it was virtually worthless and saw no point in marketing it.'
While in its present state it is an eyesore, Morley, an architecture enthusiast, speculates that the Walkers' property may once have belonged in a medieval bastide because the semicircle archway at the front of the property is reminiscent of 14th-century designs.
As Morley spoke from his end of the village, Jean-François Benezech, a retired construction expert and father of four, took a leisurely one-minute stroll from his home at the other end. Benezech previously considered making an offer on both of the Walkers' properties. 'I would like someone to buy the land and knock it down to stop it blocking my view,' he said. He invested €80,000 renovating the chateau he inherited from his parents 60 years ago and suggested it would cost at least €50,000 to renovate the Walkers' house.
The story, as told by the villagers, is that the Walker brothers were planning to develop the properties but poor construction work by the builders they hired quickly put them off and they abandoned the project. Jean-Paul Ade, 64, who lives opposite Benezech, remembers them staying in caravans for a short time on the site while they were first working on the property, but said the Walkers had not been back since.
Moth's brother has visited a few times to conduct 'maintenance' on the pigeonnier, Ade said, most recently a decade ago.
Ade has met the brother several times throughout the years. Ade's children practised English with his children. 'Through his wife, I heard that the English brother [Moth] had incurable cancer,' Ade said. 'They were friendly. I thought about buying the pigeonnaire with the idea of potentially renovating it into a guesthouse but I didn't.'
Both properties have fallen into a state of serious disrepair, said Benezech. He has seen the Pardaillan town centre suffer from depopulation and says that a primary school in the area was forced to close because it didn't have enough children.
The Observer claimed to have seen documents sent to the present inhabitant of the Walkers' repossessed home in Wales suggesting that they owed tax to the French authorities. Winn denied owing tax or any outstanding debts in France.
None of the locals were aware of claims that tax was owed by either Walker family on the properties. Morley said the tax on his property was more than affordable, certainly for a successful author, at about €250 a year.
'If you are English and you have not paid tax for, say, ten years, they will put the house up for auction,' Benezech said, while Ade added: 'Here, [dodging] tax is what English people are famed for.'
The Salt Path is 'not about every event or moment in our lives', Winn wrote in her statement, 'but rather about a capsule of time when our lives moved from a place of complete despair to a place of hope.' She added that she had sought legal advice.
Responding to the allegations of embezzlement, Winn clarified that the dispute with Hemmings was not the debt-related court proceedings featured in The Salt Path narrative that resulted in the couple losing their home, which involved a business agreement with a friend of Moth's turning sour.
She apologised for 'mistakes' that were made in the business during the time she worked as a bookkeeper for Hemmings. 'Any mistakes I made during the years in that office, I deeply regret, and I am truly sorry,' she said.
The author attached to the statement letters purportedly sent to her husband by consultant neurologists between 2015 and 2025 referencing his prior 'CBS [corticobasal syndrome] diagnosis', while another concludes that he has 'an atypical form' of CBD. She described questions about her husband's illness as 'utterly vile'.
Having just returned from hospital after an operation on his appendix, Morley is sceptical that the facts about Moth's condition matter in light of the solace readers may have found in the story of hope. With a relaxed wave of the hand typical of the residents of Le Village du Dropt, he said: 'If it helped him to recover, then good for him.'