180: PAUL FOOT 2026: THE PINCH-OF-SALT PATH
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What is the Paul Foot Award and its significance?
Hello and welcome to the last of this year's Paul Foot Award shortlist entries. We're interviewing six brilliant hacks who've produced fantastic investigative campaigning stories, all of which have been shortlisted for this year's award. So let's find out the final story shortlisted for an award this year.
Page 94, the Private Eye podcast. I'm Chloe Hedgeman-Though and I work for the Observer newspaper.
Okay, and what is the story that's brought you to the Paul Foot Award?
So what's brought me here is the true story of the true story of The Salt Path. So this is a memoir that was sold as unflinchingly honest by Penguin, written by a woman called Raina Wynne about her and her husband who are beset by misfortune. First, they lose their home after a close friend sort of tricks them out of it and they have it repossessed. And then the very same week, they find out that the husband, Moth, is suffering from a terminal neurological disease. And instead of being sort of absolutely devastated by this news, they take the quite extraordinary decision to walk the entire southwest coastal path of Britain, 630 miles. And the memoir is the story of this walk. And along the way...
somehow the effort of walking and of being in nature makes moth better the the symptoms of his disease reverse and at the same time reina discovers that her real home is with her husband and the love that they share and so this was a hugely hugely successful memoir
Yes, a lot of homes up and down the country contain a copy of Salt Path. I've got a copy at home, which a friend gave me and said this is a really fantastic book. It's a very moving true story. How did it come to your attention? Why are we talking about this memoir in the context of the Paul Foot Award?
Because I got a tip off. So a member of the public contacted me and said, I've met this couple and I think there's something fishy going on. I think you should look into them. Particularly, I don't think he is suffering from a terminal illness. I think they've over egged his illness. And so I went to my editor with this, and my editor said, I'm not sure this is a story.
What is the true story behind The Salt Path memoir?
It's really hard to prove whether somebody's ill or dying or not. Why didn't you ask them? And so the first thing I did was write to Rainer and Moth. They weren't forthcoming. They wouldn't give me an interview, and they wouldn't answer my questions. And so then I sort of begged the observer to let me go down to Wales, where they originally lived, and look into the allegations a bit more.
What did you find when you got to Wales?
I found and I had heard rumours that she worked for an estate agent and that something had gone wrong there. The relationship had broken down. So I went round all the estate agents in this small town, Porthelly in Wales, and eventually somebody said, I think I know who you need to talk to, a woman called Ros Hemmings. I think this woman worked for her husband. And so I managed to track this lady down. And Raina Wynne, who was back then known as Sally Walker, that's her legal name, had indeed worked for this estate agent. And after working there for seven years, it seems her boss discovered a substantial amount of money had gone missing. And when they looked into it, it ended up being tens of thousands of pounds.
Mr Hemmings had passed away by the time you got there, is that right?
Yes, I found his widow. And I found lots of other people who had also worked at the company.
Okay. So the story's taking on a kind of financial element as well as the initial tip-off that you've got. Did it roll on further from there?
It did. So then I discovered she'd been arrested. She had been questioned for the day and released, but then she'd fled and come down to London where she'd apparently borrowed money from a relative of her husband's, used that money to pay back her employer...
The Hemings family. The Hemings.
And that money had gone against her house. It was a loan, essentially a private mortgage. And when she and her husband weren't able to pay it off over the next few years, their house was repossessed, which was something that they wrote about in the book.
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