'We thought: it can't be the Salt Path couple - they'd have told us they were homeless'

When fellow walkers the Parsons found they were in Raynor Winn's book, they were baffled. Details of their encounter didn't add up

- Chloe Hadjimatheou

Joanne and David Parsons spent only an hour or so chatting to two other hikers they met in a cafe on the South West Coast Path, but they made a lasting impression. “We walked into a cafe to have breakfast, and when we saw them it was obvious they were walkers as well,” David recalls. “They were loaded down with [camping] stuff and using their own teabags, but they didn’t say they were homeless.”

They learned later that the couple they had spent a jovial hour with in the Fat Apples Cafe, near Porthallow in Cornwall, were Raynor Winn and her husband, Moth, after Winn subsequently wrote a bestselling memoir about the walk, The Salt Path.

From reading the memoir, the Parsons realised their encounter was mentioned in the book, when Winn describes meeting an unnamed Australian couple. Only something important didn’t add up: the dates.

In The Salt Path, Winn describes walking the 630-mile route in 2013, soon after the couple became homeless and Moth received a terminal diagnosis. But the Parsons, who are from Australia and had updated their blog regularly with details about their walk, knew that their encounter with Winn and Moth had happened two years later, in 2015.

The Salt Path was marketed as an “unflinchingly honest” true story, but an investigation by The Observer has found the author wasn't honest about the circumstances under which the couple became homeless. The investigation also raised questions about the representation of her husband's neurological condition and its severity.

The Parsons’ account is the latest in a series of discrepancies reported by The Observer that raises questions about whether Winn and Moth walked the coast path as described in the book or in fact walked it in sections over several years. Since publication of the investigation, numerous people who encountered Winn and Moth during their walk have claimed the author misrepresented their encounters or painted them in an unflattering light.