What is a salt way?
"...A salt road (also known as a salt route, salt way, saltway, or salt trading route) is any of the prehistoric and historical trade routes by which essential salt has been transported to regions that lacked it…" – (Wikipedia 1).
This provides a basic definition of a Salt Way – a route to transport salt from the extraction area to where it is needed. However this definition needs to be explored in greater depth to try and provide a firmer understanding as to what it actually means.
The first element to be addressed is the name. When is a Salt Way a Salt Road or Route? There really is no answer to this as they all tend to describe the same thing and the name is interchangeable according to the personal preferences of the author. The term to be used through out this blog will be Salt Way.
One further element needs to be added to this. A salt way is usually a route across the land, however this does not mean that it is on the land. For much of the history of man within England water or marine transportation was a vital method of conveying goods over distance. Of course there is a draw back to transporting salt by water – salt is soluble and should an accident occur then the cargo could very quickly disappear.
Salt ways are not isolated routes across the countryside. They would have been used for many other purposes – such as taking animals to market. Other well-known routes were used as salt ways. The best example of this is the extensive Roman road network throughout England. Some of the roads may well have been created specifically for the purpose - an example of this would be the Roman road out of Droitwich to Alcester that passes through Hanbury (SQ 92 63)
In England there are three main salt extraction areas. The largest by far is seashore. All around the coast, from at least the bronze age, salt has been evaporated out of sea water. Away from the sea shore there are a series of salt springs that provide brackish water that can be used to evaporate salt out of it. In England two centre’s developed; one around the settlements of Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich in Cheshire; the second at Droitwich. These three extraction areas developed their own salt ways. The first systematic description of the Droitwich salt ways was by FTS Houghton (Houghton 1929). Tens years later a similar exercise was undertaken by WB Crump (Crump 1939) for the Cheshire salt extraction sites. The salt ways described in both of these papers form the basis for the initial analysis of what a salt way is. However part of this research project was initiated to describe salt ways not contained either paper.
Bibliography
Wikipedia (2012) Salt road. [Online]. Available
from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_road [Accessed 25/10/2012]
Houghton, F T S, Saltways Trans Birmingham Arch Soc LIV (1929-30), pp 1-17
Crump, W B, 1940 ‘Saltways from the Cheshire wiches’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 54, pp 84-142
