The quest for white gold

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SALT MAKING IN THE FENS DURING THE
IRON AGE AND ROMANO-BRITISH PERIODS

Written and photographed
by ROGER CALLOW

We all take it for granted that the essential things in life today are there in the shops to purchase whenever we need them and food being the number one essential item for most people, the question of its availability and storage is something that does not really concern us too much. This was not so a couple of thousand years ago when food preservation was a real concern and more often than not a question of life or death.

For the majority of families in the Iron Age and Romano-British period, the preservation of food and in particular meat, was of vital importance and the use of salt in the preservation process was crucial.

As such the development of salt making enterprises either for your own community or on a commercial basis to sell to others became commonplace in areas where salt water was available in locations that easily lent themselves to the process and the salt marshes situated on the fringes of the Wash in Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk became one of the largest areas in the country for salt making.

The process itself is quite simple and throughout the ages has changed very little from that used thousands of years ago.

Seawater, or brine as it should be more accurately called, would be collected in settling tanks or pits to allow mud and silt to fall to the bottom. 

The brine would then be transferred to shallow ceramic dishes called briquetage where it was heated to help the evaporation of water from the brine to create a more concentrated solution which in turn would be transferred to other ceramic pots where the heating process continued until salt crystals formed on the surface which were gathered and dried. These locations where salt making took place would become known as salterns.

The scale of salt making around the Wash differed greatly from location to location and would be based on demand and availability of items such as clay and fuel such as wood or charcoal and given that wood was not in plentiful supply on the salt marshes around the Wash, the availability of established transport routes not only to bring in fuel but also to convey the salt around the country, played a part in where the salterns were established.

One of the best known of these salt routes was Salters Way which followed the route of what is now the A52, running from near Donington where the Wash salt marshes began at that time, on towards the Midlands where salt was a much traded commodity.

The remains of salterns in the Bourne and surrounding areas have been well documented over recent years with many archaeological digs having taken place on the sites and it was one of those excavations near to my home in Aslackby Fen that raised my interest in the subject.

In that case the saltern was discovered adjacent to a Roman sea bank that had been constructed around  200 A D when attempts were first being made to reclaim land beyond the Car Dyke, an early catchwater drain established by the Romans some time earlier.

In the case of this saltern, sluice gates were used to allow salt water to fill settling tanks or pools from which the brine would be taken and heated on site to abstract the salt. The findings on the site during the dig showed that the saltern was reasonably extensive in area and in use over a long period of time which indicates it may well have been one of many salterns developed along the sea bank in that area to produce salt on a commercial basis.

Its location close to Salters Way and the location of high status Roman-British settlements close by are other indications that salt making on this and surrounding fens was a thriving business venture rather than just a local self-sufficiency development.

The recent excavations at Willow Tree Fen to the east of Bourne have provided many members of the public the opportunity to see the evidence of a saltern that may have been in existence from the Iron Age period and although at first glance what appears to be just a load of brick dust spread over a wide area is in fact the remains of many thousands of discarded briquetage with clear evidence of charcoal and ash deposits buried beneath this overlying spoil.

What I found fascinating when I visited the site was the clearly defined mark of an old sea creek which meandered through the site and would have been one of the sources of seawater used to fill the settling pits with brine prior to it being transferred to the hearths where it would have been heated in the ceramic dishes (briquetage).

By the time you read this, the dig at Willow Tree Fen will have been filled in but in due course the visitors centre currently under construction will have a graphic display of the dig with many interesting illustrations and photos which will hopefully give an insight into how salt making was carried out locally when our Iron Age ancestors lived and survived on the salt marshes which have now become the fens.

PHOTO ALBUM
These pictures were taken on site by Roger Callow in October 2011 and show a cross section through discarded briquetage (top), an excavated channel ending in a settling tank (right), a cross section through an ash pit with briquetage remains overlaying (below) while the bottom picture shows the sea creek remains meandering across the site.