EXCLUSIVE Scandal-hit Salt Path author and her husband 'fell out with millionaire benefactor after moving into his farmhouse' - as claims abound that they misled readers of their hit memoir
Best-selling writer Raynor and her supposedly terminally ill husband have been engulfed in scandal after it emerged a number of key details in her memoir were apparently misreported.
Among these was the suggestion that the couple's original walk on the Cornish path that was so popular with readers was prompted when they inadvertently became homeless.
But The Observer this week claimed they lost their home as an indirect consequence of Raynor misappropriating tens of thousands of pounds from an employer.
She was said to have embezzled £64,000 from a former employer which led to her being arrested - before borrowing money from a relative to avoid prosecution, only losing her Welsh farmhouse home when this was not paid back.
The couple were also alleged to have been disingenuous about being homeless as they owned a property in France where they had previously regularly stayed.
Now MailOnline has learned that among their fans on the back of the huge success of her memoir was multi-millionaire investment banker turned cider maker, Bill Cole.
Mr Cole is understood to have been so moved by their story that, even though he had never met them, he got in touch and he invited them to live in an historic farmhouse that he owns in the countryside near Lostwithiel in Cornwall.
Mr Cole, a former partner with Frankton Capital who now describes himself as 'farmer, pirate and impact investor', is understood to have approached the couple after being moved reading the first volume of her hit book series.
The couple were living at his property and said they were helping with the cider production when they hosted TV chef and fellow famous Cornwall resident, Rick Stein, and showed him 'how they make cider in the traditional way' for a BBC programme first broadcast in March 2023.
Mr Cole, who was at the farmhouse property this week, declined to discuss the couple - real names Sally and Tim Walker - saying: 'Please leave, I'm the farmer here, I've got stuff to do.'
But a source told MailOnline that the relationship between the Winns and Mr Cole had deteriorated after they moved in.
'Bill was initially very taken with Raynor and it seemed like a perfect set up but then there was some trouble between them and it all ended badly with them falling out,' the insider said.
In an interview with Country Living magazine published last month, Raynor Winn is believed to have discussed Mr Cole's generosity publicly.
She said: 'When a stranger contacted me on Twitter with an incredible gesture, I wasn't sure how to respond.
'He owned a disused farm, nestled in the Cornish hills, and asked if Moth and I would like to live there.
'We agonised for months over the decision. It was yet another risk, to give up our home and to trust a stranger, but we decided to do it.
She continued; 'When we arrived, the land felt abused and polluted, but we've been hard at work removing plastic sheeting, nourishing the soil and bringing wildlife back to the hedgerows.
'It's become a big rewilding project – and it's worked. A year ago, there were no birds here. Now, there are woodpeckers, yellowhammers and blackcaps.
'It's amazing how quickly nature bounces back if you let it. Like humans really…
'I like to think we're rewilding [her gravely ill husband] Moth as well as the land. By putting him back into his natural state – moving out in the fields all day – his health has improved almost miraculously, just as it did when we were walking the Coast Path.
'As the landscape has become healthier, so has he. Nothing will cure his disease, but we've found a way to keep it at bay.'
The publication of this article last month gave the impression the couple's involvement on the cider farm is ongoing.
However, locals have seemingly questioned this and claimed the Winns have not been seen around the area for some time.
It's unclear how long the lag was between the interview and its publication.
When MailOnline visited this week, the pretty farmhouse did not appear to be inhabited.
The windows were thick with dust, from the front door it was clear barely any furniture was left in the house and just a few apparently abandoned items of clothing and kitchen appliances were scattered on the floor.
Neighbours in the nearby hamlet of St Veep - who knew the couple by their professional pseudonyms Raynor and Moth Winn rather than their real names - claimed they had been seen regularly in the area for some time but have not been around for some time.
One near neighbour said: 'As far as I know they've been gone for a while now.
'The farm is owned by a guy from London called Bill and they were tenants. But there was some kind of falling out.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
21 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Millet: Life on the Land review – phallic forks and suggestive wheelbarrows enliven a landscape of toil
The figures in Jean-François Millet's 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that's come to the UK on loan from the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll's, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It's harder to tell the woman's age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting's unlikely fan Salvador Dalí claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they're saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they're mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dalí. I think there's a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life's work to portray the rural poor – a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires. Landscape artists often can't draw the human figure for toffee: that means you, Constable and Turner. But Millet foregrounds the body in stark existential moments of sweaty action. Work that in reality must have been repetitive and mindless becomes full of heroic drama. In The Winnower, a man throws grains in the air in a golden mist to separate the wheat from the chaff. Painted at the time of the 1848 revolutions, when liberal and socialist risings were shaking the wheat from the chaff across Europe, the winnower is, you realise, wearing a reddish-pink bandana, a white shirt and has a blue handkerchief – the colours of the tricolour flag that the first French Revolution invented. Millet's a revolutionary and his people have plenty to rebel against. In The Sower, a man is sowing seeds in a deep gully: it looks as if he has descended into hell. This pit looks completely barren yet here he is, sowing seeds anyway, the symbolism as hard to ignore as the arses of the two cows that loom against the stormy sky above him. His act may be that of a political campaigner, sowing seeds of change, yet it's also an image of artistic creativity. The character could be Millet himself, creating something beautiful out of the brutal realities of rural toil. His autobiography is compacted into this small show. Millet was a country boy from Normandy. His painting The Well at Gruchy captures the world he grew up in – a woman fills pots of water from a stone-roofed well that appears to be centuries old. Life is slow there, in Gruchy, and history a massive, immobile presence. The Faggot Gatherers, which Millet was working on up to 1875, looks like a riposte to the impressionists' emphasis on modernity and middle-class pleasures on boulevards and in cafes. Women lug bundles of sticks through Stygian winter gloom in a scene that could just as easily have been in the 1370s as the 1870s. He found one fan looking desperately for soul in the world. Vincent van Gogh wanted to emulate Millet as a peasant painter. You see their deep connection in Millet's drawing A Man Ploughing and Another Sowing. As the broken-looking sower stumbles in the foreground and a ploughman hunches behind him, a flock of black crows rise into the sky – like the birds Van Gogh would see over the wheatfield near the end of his life. Yet for all his brooding compassion, you can't miss Millet's turbulent sexuality. The two athletic men in his painting The Wood Sawyers look as if they are cutting up a giant penis. Then again, the slices of trunk also resemble freshly butchered meat – another one for Dalí. More conventionally sexualised are Millet's portraits of shepherdesses and milkmaids. His painting The Goose Girl at Gruchy may be as much a memory of adolescent longings as a painting from life. Van Gogh in a frenzied letter claims Millet's women are as sexy as Zola's – you can see how he got to this and how much Millet's fascination with the silent passions of country people has in common with Thomas Hardy's novels. It all comes together in The Angelus, which you keep coming back to after scanning his other works. The scene it immortalises is ancient, the lives these people lived largely lost to history. Millet freezes them like statues. They grow like grass from the hard earth that can't wait to take them back. Millet: Life on the Land is at the National Gallery, London, from 7 August to 19 October
Daily Mail
2 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Hailey Bieber swears by this French pharmacy sunscreen – and it's now £21
Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. If you make a purchase via links on this page we will earn commission - learn more French pharmacies stock some of the best skincare staples. From Sienna Miller and Alexa Chung 's 'French girl secret' to great skin (spoiler: it's a £14 retinol that tackles fine lines, wrinkles and pigmentation) to a £14 multitasker that's recommended by makeup artists as a makeup primer, makeup remover or even a moisturising face mask; we stock up on a long list of products whenever we're in Paris. And so does Hailey Bieber. Whilst applying her everyday morning skincare routine in the latest episode of Vogue's Beauty Secrets, Bieber revealed she picked up a new favourite facial sunscreen on a recent trip to the capital of France: Isdin's Fotoprotector Fusion Water MAGIC Urban SPF 30. Fotoprotector ISDIN Fusion Water MAGIC Urban SPF 30 £21.30 Shop Offering broad-spectrum protection and blue light filtering, this sunscreen with SPF 30 is formulated with antioxidant-rich ginger root extract to help combat oxidative damage from pollution and screen exposure. It has an ultralight, water-based texture that's oil-free, non-comedogenic, melts into the skin and doesn't irritate the eyes. 'I love sunscreen that's really hydrating and that's going to make your skin glowy. I typically gravitate towards milkier sunscreens, or a really nice tinted sunscreen,' Bieber says in the video. 'I feel like finding the right sunscreen just takes trial and error because one of the things that breaks me out the most is sunscreen.' 'Whenever I go to Paris, or I go to Europe, I love to go to the pharmacy and raid the suncare section because I just think the sunscreens from Europe are so much better than in the US,' she adds. 'They're my favourite. I got this one at the pharmacy when I was in Paris last time and I'm obsessed with it. I wish that I had bought five.' Before she continues with her minimal makeup routine, Bieber applies sunscreen to her hands, a body part many of us forget to shield from the sun. 'When I have leftover [product], I rub it on my hands,' she explains, 'because when you're driving and it's sunny, I just feel like your hands get the brunt of ageing.'
BBC News
4 hours ago
- BBC News
Dead hedgehog which was set on fire found in Plymouth woods
Increased police patrols are taking place near a woods in Plymouth after the remains of a dead hedgehog believed to have been set on fire were found. The force said the hedgehog was found on 31 July at the entrance of Ham Woods and suffered injuries "consistent with being set alight". A spokesperson said the actions would "not be tolerated" and those responsible would "be dealt with robustly". Devon and Cornwall Police said it is investigating the offence of causing unnecessary suffering to an animal. Police said anyone with any information or who witnessed the incident should contact them.
