Open-pan salt making

A bastard brine used to be made by allowing freshwater to run through abandoned rock salt mines.

Only five complexes of inland open-pan salt works now survive in the world: Lion Salt Works, Cheshire, United Kingdom; Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, Salins-les-Bains, France;[6] Saline Luisenhall, Göttingen, Germany;[7] the Salinas da Fonte da Bica, Rio Maior, Portugal;[8] and the Colorado Salt Works, USA.

[10] The earliest examples of pans used in the solution mining of salt date back to ancient times when the pans were made of ceramics known as briquetage and Cheshire VCP (Very Coarse Pottery), a coarse low-fired pottery.

In Britain, these materials began to be identified from the early 1980s in the Marches (Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Shropshire and Wales)[11] and later in Northern England.

[12] The Romans introduced small (3 ft square) pans made from lead using wood as a fuel.

In Britain they established towns for salt production at Droitwich in Worcestershire,[13] and Nantwich,[14] Middlewich[15][16] and Northwich[17] in Cheshire.

William Brownrigg writing in 1748, in his Book of Common Salt, shows a wood-cut of one of these salt-making pans.

Brine was pumped from the ground using wind and later, steam-driven beam engines, and redistributed to large iron pans.

It was then the job of the lumpman to rake-up the salt and skim it into wooden tubs to create lumps, hence the name.

This would produce a much denser crystal with a variety of sizes known as common or fishery salt.

[22] The following are historical names given to occupations in open pan salt works, primarily in Cheshire, England.