A former City investment banker who offered his home on a Cornish orchard to the embattled author of The Salt Path and her husband said that he felt “gaslit” by the couple as their relationship deteriorated.
Bill Cole, 58, was left frustrated by conflicting messages about the health of Raynor Winn’s husband, Moth, whose degenerative condition forms the background to her three best-selling memoirs.
The Salt Path, which has sold two million copies worldwide, charts the couple’s 630-mile trek along the South West Coast Path after the double whammy of being made homeless and Moth’s diagnosis.
Addressing the breakdown in their relationship, Cole said that he was led to believe that Moth was dying at a time when Winn wrote that doctors had deemed his condition to be normal.
Raynor Winn
ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES
Winn, whose real name is Sally Walker, has been at the centre of a publishing storm after former acquaintances raised questions about whether parts of her “true” story were fabricated.
The author’s portrayal of how she and her husband lost their cottage in rural North Wales is at the centre of the controversy. The memoir blames the repossession of the home on a friend after a bad business investment.
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It fails to mention how the couple’s financial predicament was linked to Winn’s alleged theft of £64,000 from an employer. Experts have also questioned Winn’s portrayal of her husband’s condition, corticobasal degeneration.
Cole offered his farmhouse to the couple after being moved while reading the memoir in 2018, supposedly describing it as a “300-page CV”.
He particularly empathised with Winn’s struggles as his wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Cole contacted Winn on X and proposed that they should take on Haye Farm, which sits alongside a creek close to the River Fowey.
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Unable to maintain the property due to his wife’s need to be close to a hospital, Cole provided a small fee for them to take it on. They moved in in late 2019.
Raynor Winn and her husband Moth attended a screening of The Salt Path in May, before the scandal broke
HUGH R HASTINGS/GETTY IMAGES
The film starred Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs
ALAMY
Cole is depicted as a City trader called Sam in Winn’s second book, The Wild Silence, that details how she and Moth move to the the neglected cider farm, helping to revitalise it and Moth’s health.
The wealthy businessman was based in Sussex but often visited the couple at the Cornwall site close to the hamlet of St Veep.
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In an interview with The Observer, Cole described how Moth — short for Timothy — had told him about a setback with his degenerative condition in October 2021.
“He put his head in his hands and he said: ‘We went to the hospital this week and I’ve been told not to plan beyond Christmas’,” Cole said. “I just went and gave him a big hug.”
Cole had become close friends with the couple and prioritised their wellbeing even though the cider farm that they were meant to be looking after was losing money.
While reading Winn’s third book, Landlines, published in 2022, Cole was surprised to see the author recount how in the same period a neurologist had described Moth’s brain scan as normal.
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Cole, who now runs the farm, owns a spirits company and works as an impact investment manager, said: “I was reading it on a train and I just went: ‘What the hell?’ It just makes no sense whatsoever.”
Cole sent a message to Winn asking why if there was such good news, they had not told him. He said that she replied several days later but did not address the point.
He was left surprised when the couple were filming at the farm with Rick Stein, the celebrity chef, for a BBC series on Cornwall several weeks later.
Cole said that Winn and Moth talked through the cider-making process at the centuries-old orchard even though this was a process they were not involved in. “I felt like I was being gaslit,” he said.
The couple ended their tenancy shortly after without saying goodbye in person, leaving the key under a pot and a note on the table. Cole said that he has barely had contact with them since.
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When The Times visited the property last week, the farmhouse appeared to have been abandoned, with little furniture inside and thick dust around the windows.
A local said that the couple had left the property, supposedly on “bad terms” with Cole.
In a statement published on Wednesday, Winn defended her memoir, while saying that she was “truly sorry” for mistakes made while she was working for her former employer, Martin Hemmings, in Pwllheli, Wales. She gave no further details about the allegations of theft.
She described claims that Moth had made up his illness as “utterly vile, unfair, and false” and published extracts from letters written by his consultant neurologists.
In one letter, dated 2015, a consultant neurologist speculates that Moth could be affected “very mildly” by the condition.
She described The Observer’s article that first revealed the alleged inaccuracies as “grotesquely unfair, highly misleading and seeks to systematically pick apart my life”.
Penguin, which has published her three books, defended its pre-publication due diligence. It has delayed the publication of the fourth book, On Winter Hill, which was due in October.
Winn’s representatives have been contacted for comment.