Salt: Scotland’s Newest Oldest Industry

By Christopher A. Whatley and Joanna Hambly

Salt is a vital commodity. For many centuries it sustained life for Scots as seasoning for a diet dominated by grains (mainly oats), and for preservation of fish and cheese.

Sea-salt manufacturing is one of Scotland’s oldest industries, dating to the eleventh century if not earlier. Smoke- and steam-emitting panhouses were once a common sight along the country’s coastline and are reflected in many of Scotland’s placenames. The industry was a high-status activity, with the monarch initially owning salt pans. Salt manufacture was later organized by Scotland’s abbeys and then by landowners who had access to the sea and a nearby supply of coal. As salt was an important source of tax revenue for the government, it was often a cause of conflict (and military action) between Scotland and England. The future of the industry – and the price of salt for consumers – was a major issue during negotiations around the Union of 1707.

This book celebrates both the history and the rebirth of the salt industry in Scotland. Although salt manufacturing declined in the nineteenth century and was wound up in the 1950s, in the second decade of the twenty-first century the trade was revived. Scotland’s salt is now a high-prestige, green product that is winning awards and attracting interest across the UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Donald
• Release date: Nov 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781788855907

Book preview

Illustration

Salt

Illustration

First published in Great Britain in 2023 by

John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

ISBN: 978 1 788855 90 7

Copyright © Individual contributors 2023

The right of individual contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of

Historic Environment Scotland

and

The Strathmartine Trust

Illustration

towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available on request

from the British Library

Designed and typeset by Mark Blackadder

Title page image: Isle of Skye Sea

Salt evaporation site at sunset

Printed and bound in Latvia by PNB Print

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Plates

List of Contributors

1  Introduction

Christopher A. Whatley and Joanna Hambly

2  A Brief History of Scottish Salt from the Eleventh Century to the Late Twentieth Century

Richard Oram and Christopher A. Whatley

3  Working Lives at the Pans: Skills, Serfdom – and the Salt Officers

Christopher A. Whatley

4  The Archaeology of Scottish Salt

Joanna Hambly

5  The Story of Salt Making in Brora, East Sutherland, 1598–1825 Malcolm Bangor-Jones, Joanna Hambly and Jacqueline Aitken

6  A Salter’s Tale: From Clackmannan to Portsoy

John Blair

7  Salt on Scotland’s Southern Coast

Nic Coombey and John Pickin

8  An Early Modern Salt-Making Complex in Pittenweem (Fife) 1534–1567

R. Anthony Lodge

9  St Philips Saltworks, St Monans, Fife: ‘one of the neatest and best contrived saltworks on the coast’

Colin Martin, Paula Martin and Robin Murdoch

10 No Salt without Coal, No Coal without Salt: The Painting of an Eighteenth-Century Scottish Industrial Estate

Charles Wemyss

11 Cockenzie, 1722, and the Recovery of a Saltwork Community

Ed Bethune, Gareth Jones, Alan Braby, Gary Donaldson and Aaron Allen

12 Community and Experimental Salt Making in Cockenzie and Brora: Learning about Historic Technologies by Doing

Gary Donaldson, Jacqueline Aitken and Penny Paterson

13 Blackthorn Salt, Ayr: Traditional Salt Making in the Twenty-First Century

Whirly Marshall

14 Salt Making on the Isle of Skye: Eighteenth Century to the Present (and the Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company)

Chris and Meena Watts

Afterword

Christopher A. Whatley

Notes

Further Reading

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is the culmination of a great deal of archaeological and historical research, some by full-time academics or those professionally trained in these disciplines, and some by others who have pursued their interest in salt in their spare time or have made it into their livelihoods. They were brought together in a Scottish Salt Symposium in 2021 held in Brora, one of Scotland’s unlikely historic salt production centres. This book is a fitting outcome of that gathering of enthusiasts.

The editors sincerely thank our writers for their dedication to this project and for contributing a wealth of new research and interesting fresh information about the people and places of where salt in Scotland was and is being made. Several of our contributors have made use of archival material held locally, as well as in national repositories such as the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland. Use has also been made of the invaluable services of the National Register of Archives (Scotland) in accessing material held privately. We should record our thanks to the staff of those institutions for their assistance.

Publishing the book was made possible by a generous grant from Historic Environment Scotland. An award from the Strathmartine Trust supported reproduction costs for illustrations and the all-important indexing.

We are indebted to Paula Martin, who copy-edited all the chapters and made helpful suggestions and corrections to the text. Sarah Boyd brought her artistic eye and skills to the front cover. John Pickin drew the map of salt production sites mentioned in the text. Just before the book went to print Steven Blench kindly provided us with information about the use of ‘pan scratch’ – a waste material from the salt pans – in the building trade.

Our thanks are due too to Hugh Andrew and his colleagues at Birlinn/John Donald for agreeing to publish this book and their ongoing enthusiasm for the project. This includes the managing editor Mairi Sutherland and the freelance copy-editor Camilla Rockwood.

Christopher A. Whatley and Joanna Hambly

List of Plates

1   Salt seller, St Fillans.

2   Detail from ‘Map of the Loch of Spynie and adjacent grounds’, 1783.

3   Saltworks interior, Lymington, 1782.

4   Brora’s sixteenth- or seventeenth-century salt girnel and office.

5   One of Brora’s eighteenth-century panhouses.

6   The Lands of Wemyss with the House of West Wemyss and its Saltpans by Johan van der Sijpern, 1718.

7   Detail from the Hogg plan of 1788 relating to a dispute for development of St Philips Saltworks, St Monans, Fife.

8   A detail of Cockenzie Harbour, after 1835, with saltpan houses in the background.

9   The Auld Kirk panhouse, Cockenzie.

10  Brora’s experimental saltpan in operation.

11  Master salter Gregorie Marshall inside the Blackthorn Tower.

12  Isle of Skye Sea Salt pond with founders Chris and Meena Watts harvesting the sea salt crystals.

List of Contributors

Jacqueline Aitken is a digital and heritage curator at Timespan in Helmsdale and has a background in museums, immersive technology and archaeology. As a supporter of community archaeology, Jacquie initiated the Brora Salt Pans project in 1999. She now coordinates the research group and is a traditional salt maker.

Aaron Allen held several teaching and research fellowships in economic and social history at the University of Edinburgh, and is a committee member for the 1722 Waggonway Heritage Group. He is the author of several books, including Building Early Modern Edinburgh: A Social History of Craftwork and Incorporation.

Malcolm Bangor-Jones is an independent researcher with a particular interest in the history of the northern Highlands. His most recent articles cover the resettlement of Strathnaver by the Congested Districts Board and Sutherland emigration to Prince Edward Island. He is the chair of ARCH (Archaeology for Communities in the Highlands).

Ed Bethune is an early railway historian and heritage media consultant as well as the founder and chairperson of the 1722 Waggonway Heritage Group. He has been researching the Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway since 2013 and has written for the NLS magazine Discover as well as for History Scotland and East Lothian Life. He has also appeared on BBC’s Digging for Britain.

John Blair is emeritus fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, and emeritus professor of Medieval History and Archaeology. He works on medieval society, landscape, buildings and material culture. He is delighted that his ancestor Alexander Blair has led him into a new field of study, which he has found fascinating.

Alan Braby is a freelance archaeologist based in East Lothian. He specialises in artefact and reconstruction illustration. He has worked on archaeological sites across the UK, including the 1722 Tranent–Cockenzie Waggonway, and works extensively with National Museums of Scotland. He is the lead archaeologist for the 1722 Waggonway Project.

Nic Coombey, a landscape architect for over 30 years, has increasingly specialised in the management of heritage projects in Dumfries and Galloway. Initially with Solway Heritage, he now works with Solway Firth Partnership on diverse projects that share an inspirational coastline through electronic and printed media, activities and events.

Gary Donaldson has been involved in the 1722 Waggonway Project since 2017 and is now its most experienced salter. He has contributed to several of the group’s publications, including The Work Journals of William Dickson, The Quietus Account of Tranent Parish and the history guide to the 1722 Waggonway.

Joanna Hambly is an archaeologist and research fellow with the SCAPE Trust at the University of St Andrews. She specialises in the archaeology of the coastal zone and working with the public. She has run award-winning community projects which combine the two, including the later excavations at the Brora salt pans.

Gareth Jones is a conservation architect and Waggonway Group committee member. He became interested in Scotland’s salt industry during a pan house excavation in Bo’ness and has since travelled the coastline visiting production sites. He conceived and built the group’s experimental pan and continues to research the historic manufacturing process.

R. Anthony Lodge is emeritus professor of French in St Andrews University. His area of specialist research is the history of French language and particularly the dialects of medieval Auvergne. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Paris-Sorbonne University. He published a history of Pittenweem Priory in 2020.

Whirly Marshall co-founded Blackthorn Salt with her husband Gregorie. They live with their three children and dog in the Ayrshire hills. Besides salt, Whirly loves history and swimming outdoors. The couple are keen home cooks, love their family time and when Gregorie is immersed in architectural magazines, Whirly turns to books, plenty of them . . .

Colin Martin is a retired maritime archaeologist who taught at St Andrews University from 1973 to 2002. As well as excavating historic shipwrecks (three Spanish Armada, a Dutch East Indiaman and two seventeenth-century English warships), his research has included air photography and the investigation of maritime landscapes.

Paula Martin came to Scotland to work on several historic shipwrecks. Subsequent employment included Open University tutoring, cataloguing manuscripts and editing an academic journal. She has conducted archaeological survey in the West Highlands, and researched various aspects of the history and industrial and coastal archaeology of Fife.

Robin Murdoch is a former aerospace chief test engineer who has been involved in archaeology for over 50 years, the last 30 professionally. He is no longer actively digging but he specialises in glass, reporting on assemblages for other parties/archaeological contractors.

Richard Oram is professor of Medieval and Environmental History at the University of Stirling. He specialises in the history of resource use and environmental change in the North Atlantic world across the last two millennia and has published extensively on energy transitions, climate change and epidemic disease.

Penny Paterson graduated from Aberdeen University in 1978 with a degree in Economic History. She has had long-term involvement with Clyne Heritage Society and been active in the excavations and research of the Salt Pans on the Back Beach and Lower Brora since 2004.

John Pickin has a background in museums and archaeology and was for many years the curator at Stranraer Museum. He has a particular interest in landscape archaeology and in the archaeology of pre-industrial mining and quarrying. He is a member of the Early Mines Research Group.

Chris Watts is co-founder and director of the multi-award-winning Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company. Formed in 2011, the company is the longest-established sea salt producer in Scotland and has been described as the pioneer of the renaissance of the Scottish sea salt industry.

Meena Watts has 25 years’ experience in international development with an emphasis on sustainable projects. These included the establishment of the health promotion infrastructure in Estonia. Apart from co-managing and directing the Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company, she plays a prominent role in promoting dance and theatre activities on Skye.

Charles Wemyss, the author of Noble Houses of Scotland, is an architectural historian and a direct lineal descendant of David, 1st Earl of Wemyss, the successful seventeenth-century industrial entrepreneur.

Christopher A. Whatley OBE, FRSE pioneered the serious study of Scotland’s salt making with The Scottish Salt Industry 1570–1850 (1987). His other books include Scottish Society 1707–1830 (2000), The Scots and the Union (2006), Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (2016) and Pabay: An Island Odyssey (2019).

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Christopher A. Whatley and Joanna Hambly

On the island of Skye, three miles or so south of the harbour village of Uig that connects Skye with the Outer Hebrides, there is a signpost to Cuidrach. A somewhat rutted, winding single-lane road leads towards the coast – and the vast expanse of Loch Snizort. Nearby, in the inlet of Poll na h-Eallaidh, a dun is visible. The final stretch of what by now is an unmetalled track heads in the direction of the squat ruins of the late sixteenth-century Caisteal Uisdein (‘Hugh’s castle’). This was built by Hugh Macdonald, unsuccessful claimant to the chiefdom of clan Macdonald, who died in a dungeon at Duntulm. On the way to the ruin, however, the sharp-eyed walker, looking to the right, will spot, lying low along the seashore, south of the point at Ard nan Eireachd, four polytunnels: three long, one shorter than the others.

These comprise the production facility of the Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company.1 The polytunnels, however, are still and quiet. The passer-by might ask what they’re doing there. Most of the time there’s nobody around. But in fact much is going on. Slowly and silently. Fresh seawater, drawn by a single pipe into the tunnels and spread thinly over the floors, is evaporating, even in the mixed weather that makes for a typical Skye summer. And after a few days salt crystals begin to form. Eventually there are enough of these to be drawn into piles of gleaming white salt and harvested. Then packed, and sold, either in the Company’s own small drums of salt in delicatessens or, in larger quantities, to season butter or add a unique touch to fudge and ice cream.

This is a twenty-first-century venture – the first of the country’s modern salt-making operations, established by Chris and Meena Watts not much more than a decade ago – and is the subject of Chapter 14. It is not the first time that an attempt has been made to manufacture salt on Skye. A Magnus Prince, about whom we know little, seems to have tried to do so in the early eighteenth century, in an unknown location on the Sleat peninsula in the south of Skye. To date, no firm paper evidence, nor archaeological traces that would suggest salt was actually made, have been found. But apart from the Cuidrach enterprise, this is the only example of salt manufacturing on Skye at scale and is likely to have been short-lived, if indeed production ever got under way. There have, however, been some successful Hebridean salt-making undertakings in the past. The island of Islay, also on Scotland’s Atlantic coast but south of Skye, is renowned nowadays for its whisky distilleries. Yet marine salt was being manufactured there from the later seventeenth century, and the island has very recently seen the establishment of two new salt-making companies. Salt was also made on clan Campbell lands on the Kintyre peninsula, although output was sporadic. Other places in Scotland where there has been a revival of salt making include Blackthorn Salt in Ayr, located appropriately in Saltpans Road, and, from December 2021, at St Monans in Fife under the auspices of the East Neuk Salt Company, run by Darren and Mhairi Peattie. The Watts’ pioneering enterprise on Skye, which relies on solar evaporation, has influenced other sea salt makers as far distant as Nova Scotia (OK Sea Salt) and New Zealand (Opito Bay Salt Co.).

Illustration

Figure 1.1 Principal salt-manufacturing sites mentioned in the text. Drawn by John Pickin.

Ayr and St Monans have histories of salt making going back centuries and are the subject of Chapters 13 and 9 respectively in this book. In Chapter 13, Whirly Marshall gives an account of the development of Blackthorn Salt – an enterprise inspired by a method of making salt from mainland Europe, using thorn-towers to concentrate the brine and save precious fuel in the heating and crystallisation stage. Chapter 9 is an overview by Colin and Paula Martin and Robin Murdoch of what is arguably the most complete former salt-manufacturing site in Scotland, at St Monans. Nearby were pans at one time the property of, and operated by, feuars of Pittenweem Priory – the subject of Chapter 8, a meticulous study by R. Anthony Lodge using charters, maps and landscape features. Lodge’s focus is the sixteenth century, a period in the history of the Scottish salt industry about which relatively little is known. Although both the contemporary works at Ayr and in St Monans use techniques to manufacture salt that differ from those in the past, the raw material – seawater – remains the same. Recent community projects in the former salt-making places of Cockenzie and Brora have sought to better understand traditional methods of salt manufacture through an experimental approach based on William Brownrigg’s seminal The Art of Making Common Salt, first published in 1748. These are documented in Chapter 12 by Gary Donaldson, Jacqueline Aitken and Penny Paterson. Ed Bethune and his colleagues at Cockenzie in the 1722 Waggonway Heritage Group pioneered this experimental approach by making a small-scale replica pan in the garden at Cockenzie House. The other results of their ambitious and hugely fruitful search for what remains of the Tranent to Cockenzie waggonway – the first in Scotland – and the saltpans it was partly built to serve (with coal) are documented in Chapter 11.

The process of making usable salt in Scotland began at least 1,000 or so years prior to the industry’s current resurgence. Indeed, we can say with some certainty that salt making in Scotland had a presence by the eleventh century. (More is said about this in Richard Oram’s contribution to Chapter 2.) But that is unlikely to have been the beginning. Elsewhere in Europe as well as in England, salt had been manufactured thousands of years earlier. Salt-making sites south of the border have been identified from the Bronze and Iron Ages, and recently claims have been made for a Neolithic saltern at Loftus in the north-east of England.2 It is entirely plausible that similar activity took place in Scotland, but as yet no evidence for this has been uncovered.

In the eleventh century the status of salt was at an all-time high, with saltpans in Scotland (as elsewhere in Europe where salt was made) the property of monarchs – King David I and William the Lion, to name but two of Scotland’s. There was even a ‘Master of the Royal Saltworks’ in the thirteenth century.3 Royal owners in turn made grants of their pans to several of the country’s monastic houses, such as Dunfermline and Newbattle Abbeys and Pittenweem Priory. After the Reformation most saltworks became the property of the nation’s landed elite and lairds, while smaller single-pan operations were sometimes taken over by burgh burgesses or those of similarly high rank who saw ownership of a saltpan or pans as an attractive business proposition. And this is what they were, as is tellingly illustrated in Chapter 10 by Charles Wemyss, for the Wemyss estate.

During the industry’s heyday, from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, most salt in Scotland was made in large iron pans that could be 14ft long and 7ft broad, and 18in deep, although dimensions could vary and the pans became bigger in the early nineteenth century. In the mid 1760s Dr John Roebuck had experimented – unsuccessfully – with a pan of 55ft × 32ft at his works at Corbyhall, Bo’ness.4 The pans were heated from below, supported above fires and later furnaces located in enclosed stone-built buildings called panhouses.5 Seawater was stored in rock-cut reservoirs and then conveyed up into storage containers outside the pans, first by hand buckets and later by means of wands and buckets. By the end of the eighteenth century much less labour-intensive ‘force’ or even windmill-driven pumps, as at St Monans, were being used, although not universally. Whichever means was used, the water when raised was then run by gravity into the pans as required. The water was evaporated by the heat from fires, and later furnaces, set below the pans, fuelled by coal or, much less often, peat. The process was lengthy – it took around 24 hours to make a ‘full’ (pan) of salt.

Illustration

Figure 1.2 The Isle of Skye Sea Salt Company production facility.

Visually a saltworks a couple of centuries or more ago would have looked radically different, above all because the stone-built panhouses with their steeply pitched thatched or pantiled roofs constantly belched forth great clouds of smoke and steam. Visitors were struck and even appalled by the denseness of the discharges from the works – the smoke did visible damage to the surrounding flora and fauna, one of the earliest instances in Scotland of environmental degradation. Salt making nowadays is a clean operation. Both aurally and visually, there were other contrasts. Old-style salt making was an exceptionally laborious business, requiring workers to be present for many hours. Something of what was involved is described in Chapters 3 and 12. The pans had to be refilled three or four times, depending on the salinity of the seawater, and the water in them stirred and scraped clean of impurities which congealed into a messy scum on the surface, drawn by ox-blood and other coagulants that the salters threw onto the boiling water. The fires too had to be continuously stoked at a steady pace. The salt was drawn once a full pan was made. The salt was then drained and carried in salt ‘pocks’ (or sacks), often by women, to the nearby salt stores, known as girnels. In these it would be stored until purchased, the older the better, as newly made salt lost weight in the weeks after its manufacture. Canny fish merchants insisted that only the ‘oldest salt’ was acceptable, given that they could lose money if they bought a certain quantity at the Forthside pans but found after a voyage to, say, Peterhead, the weight delivered was considerably less.6 But there were similarities with today’s producers. Remarkable then as now is how few workers the salt-making process employed. A single pan in the eighteenth century might require the services of only three people directly – the master salter, his or her assistant, and a labourer who could be the panmaster’s wife or older child. On the other hand, also present would have been a small army of tradesmen – masons, smiths and others – who made frequent repairs to the panhouses, the pans, the salters’ houses and other associated structures. This is elaborated upon in Chapters 3 and 4, the latter a survey of what recent archaeological investigations have revealed about Scotland’s salt industry.

The removal of salt taxes in 1825 might have sounded the death knell of the industry in Scotland. But closures were not immediate and not everywhere. It was the peripheral works that went to the wall first. On the Firth of Forth – always the main centre of production, largely because of the ready availability of coal – many long-established works survived. Grangepans, for example, carried on until 1889, blending denser Cheshire rock salt with seawater. This imported salt, dissolved in seawater, greatly strengthened the brine and reduced evaporation costs, cutting the number of boilings required from three or four to one.7 It also made for an excellent cooking salt.8 Nor had the trade entirely disappeared by the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed it was said of Prestonpans in 1902 that while there were only two pans, ‘owing to their size and capability’ they were ‘equal to at least four of the old times’.9 In July 1903 the Scottish Salt Company at the centuries-old Pinkie Pans in Musselburgh advertised for a young man who ‘wanted to learn salt-making’.10 The longest survivor was Prestonpans – known into the sixteenth century as Salt Preston or Prieston, which referenced the town’s medieval origins as a place where monks once operated the saltpans. Production there carried on until the 1950s.

The big picture: Scotland’s salt in context

Marine salt manufacturing is Scotland’s oldest mass-production industry. As the first manufacturing process specifically designed around coal, it was an industry that foreshadowed the later coal-fuelled industrialisation process in Britain.11 Scottish sea salt is now a commodity generally aimed at the higher end of the market, but it was once ubiquitous. Scots, like human beings across much of the globe, needed salt. Salt, and therefore the ability to preserve food, provided one of the foundations of settled civilisations. With it, otherwise bland baked and boiled foodstuffs could be seasoned. For Scots this was a blessing, especially during periods when the diets of most ordinary people were based heavily on grains – mainly oats and oatmeal. These had been the staff of life for the very poor for centuries, but from the later sixteenth century this became true for the population at large, with 70% or more of their nutrition being derived from farinaceous foods, which meant several bowls of porridge or brose daily.12 Salt was the main condiment, with the typical household at the turn of the eighteenth century consuming at least two pecks (or roughly 32 pints) annually (Plate 1). Sir John Clerk remarked that ‘for the poor it [salt] is often a food in itself, which they can no more live without than bread’.13 It is little wonder that in his oft-quoted speech late in 1706, directed against the proposed union of the English and Scottish Parliaments, Lord Belhaven – at this point in his opportunistic political career proclaiming his Scottish patriotism – conjured up the melancholy image of Scots, ‘an obscure, poor people’, eating ‘saltless pottage’. This was the grim consequence, he argued, that would follow the imposition of English salt taxes, one of the prospects of incorporation that caused him at the conclusion of his speech to break down in tears.14 The other great benefit of salt was that meat and fish, and some dairy products, could be preserved. Food producers could earn money from the selling of preserved produce, and householders could salt down a cow or pig to make survival during the colder, less propitious seasons more comfortable. Cattle, too, were fed salt, while craftsmen such as tanners made use of salt to treat hides and it served as a flux for glassmakers and a glaze for potters.

In a less utilitarian manner, salt in Scotland, as well as in other parts of the world, has assumed a powerful symbolic meaning – as a mark of friendship, or as a foil against evil spirits. Looking back to the earlier years of the nineteenth century, the Reverend James Napier in 1879 reported how a bridesmaid on the evening prior to the bride’s marriage would sprinkle salt on the floor of what was to