In 2018, the illustrated cover of The Sa lt Path caught Bill Cole’s eye, and he found himself profoundly moved by the story. His wife had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer, so Raynor Winn’s struggle to come to terms with her partner’s condition resonated with him. As did the idea that the couple had been conned by a close friend. Bill had also been betrayed by someone, costing him both professionally and personally, so he felt sympathy with Winn and her husband, Moth.

Bill, 58, had spent more than 30 years working in the City, mainly at a Dutch agricultural firm, Rabo Bank. He had saved for three decades to indulge his dream of owning his own farm. In 2011 he bought Haye at St Veep, nestl ing in the stunning Cornwall countryside overlooking the River Fowey. The heritage apple orchards have yielded cider there for more than 800 years.

But his wife’s cancer diagnosis meant they had to be near a hospital, so the family had never managed to live on the farm. After reading how Raynor and Moth needed a home, Bill told his wife he might have found their next tenants. “She looked at me like she was going to kill me and said : Don’t even think about it! ” But Bill made the couple an offer to live on the farm for a very low rent with a small fee for helping out .

By this point, Raynor Winn was a bestselling author after the 2018 publication of her book The Salt Path, an account of her and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path – a “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by the sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness. 

It was at Haye farm that Winn wrote her second and third books during the four years the couple lived there. In the description for her second book, The Wild Silence, Bill’s offer is described as “an incredible gesture by someone who reads their story”, which “changes everything”.

Bill Cole also appears as the character Sam, described as a City banker with designer sunglasses: “A man whose hands appeared never to have seen dirt, or caught the fleece of a ewe thick with lanolin, or laid a hedge. The clean soft hands of an office worker.”

Winn writes about signing the tenancy agreement for Haye farm : “Did this finally mean that there was no doubt about where we would sleep next month, next year, that Moth wouldn’t need to worry about homelessness entering his life again?”

Bill, who lived in Sussex but visited Cornwall often, says the couple told him they wanted to be involved in tending the orchards, producing cider and rewilding the farm. “They seemed happy there,” says Bill, who recalls that they often suggested that the farm was having a beneficial effect on Moth’s health. 

But in October 2021, Bill says, Moth surprised him with an announcement. “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.’” Bill was horrified. “I just went : ‘Oh my God!’ and gave him a big hug.”

Bill’s friend Richard, who asked us not to use his surname, was present for the conversation. “It was extraordinarily emotional,” he recalls. “Bill was close to tears. Moth also told him he thought he would already be dead if he hadn’t been living on Haye farm.”

Richard remembers that Bill had become close to Raynor and Moth, messaging them most days. Richard says he was concerned for his friend, however, because the farm was losing money. Cider was not being produced and the orchards were not being attended to.

“But he didn’t care,” says Richard. “He felt kind of responsible for them, and for Moth’s well being .”

No one disputes that Moth has been diagnosed with a serious condition and remains unwell. His diagnosis, of corticobasal degeneration, is a disease that affects movement, speech and memory, and presents in complex and varied ways. What has been questioned by experts is Winn’s account of her husband’s disease, and her claim that the challenging walks they undertook helped reverse the symptoms. 

An Observer investigation revealed last week inaccuracies in The Salt Path, including that the couple lost their home after Sally Walker – Raynor Winn’s real name – was accused in 2008 of embezzling tens of thousands of pounds from her employer.

The revelation casts doubt on one of the central claims in the bestselling memoir: that the couple was made homeless, through no fault of their own, after a bad investment.

Medical letters disclosed by Winn last week in response to The Observer’s reporting confirm that Moth – also known by his legal name, Tim Walker – was diagnosed with a neurological condition, corticobasal degeneration (CBD). But according to these letters, in 2015, 2019 and 2025 doctors said his specific presentation of the disease was “very mild”, “stable” and “indolent”, which means slowly progressing.

When Winn’s third book, Landlines, was published in September 2022, Bill read how, in the winter of 2021, soon after Moth had finished another long walk, a neurologist told him his brain scan was “normal”, implying that the walk had drastically improved the symptoms of his condition.

‘I feel there is so much more we don’t know about these people’ 

The timing in the book seemed to indicate that this was ­happening at around the same time as Bill recalls being told that Moth was dying.

“I was reading it on a train,” Bill recalls, “and I just went : ‘What the hell?’ It just makes no sense whatsoever.”

Bill couldn’t understand why, if Moth had had such a positive result from the doctor, the couple wouldn’t have shared the good news with him. Bill texted Raynor expressing his confusion. After a few days she responded to him but didn’t address his question about Moth’s illness.

A few weeks later, the chef Rick Stein was due to film an episode of his BBC series with the couple at Haye farm. Bill says he watched as they demonstrated the cider-making process, implying that they were involved in the farm’s production – something Bill says they had never done. “I felt I was being gaslit,” he recalls.

Not long after, Raynor and Moth terminated their tenancy at Haye farm, a year earlier than agreed. When Bill went to the farm to see them off, they were already gone.

“The key was under a plant pot and a message was left on the kitchen table,” he says. He has had almost no contact with them since.

In a statement, Winn re stated the position published on her website : “I have never sought to offer medical advice in my books or suggest that walking might be some sort of miracle cure for CB S [corticobasal syndrome], I am simply charting Moth’s own personal journey and battle with his illness, and what has helped him.”

Winn reiterates that she has charted Moth’s condition “with such a level of honesty”.

The Observer’s revelations last week about inaccuracies in Raynor Winn’s account of how they lost their home have added to Bill’s confusion. “I feel there is so much more we don’t know about these people,” he says.

The Observer also found that Winn and her husband owned a property in France while claiming to be homeless.

The story has caused a furore in the world of publishing, with many readers asking whether Penguin had carried out appropriate fact-checking on the book before publication and whether other aspects of the book also contained inaccuracies.

Penguin did not respond to The Observer but has issued two statements in recent days defending its “pre-publication due diligence”. It said its priority was to support Winn and that it made the decision to delay publication of her latest book, On Winter Hill, with that in mind. Photographs Bill Cole, Karen Robinson/The Observer