Salt-making: the cameo

Ros Ereira, cameo producer

We decided to do a cameo about salt works when we realised that the St Osyth site was exactly the right sort of environment for making salt – and that in fact salt is still produced just down the road at Maldon. Unfortunately, this had to be cut back to almost nothing in the finished programme, as the archaeology ended up being so complex that there simply wasn't enough time to fit it all in. This was a great shame as the cameo had been amazingly successful and very interesting.

Andrew Fielding and his assistant, from the Lion Salt Works Trust, demonstrated how salt-making would have been carried out at sites such as this and produced an enormous mountain of salt in just a single day. Then Derek Lawrence was able to demonstrate how salt was vital in food preservation, salting and smoking fish, and cooking some amazing salt beef to an original recipe. We were able to taste the food – along with a barrel of the local ale – at the end of the day, and it was polished off very quickly indeed!

Andrew Fielding, Lion Salt Works Trust

The Lion Salt Works Trust is working to restore the last open-pan salt works in Cheshire as a working salt museum. Part of the research being carried out involves building replica salt pans and hearths from different periods.

Our role in the St Osyth cameo involved making salt at the edge of the salt marsh in a lead salt pan, which we constructed with the help of Phil Harding. A simple lead salt pan was made by folding a 5mm sheet of lead to make the pan 750mm square with a 100mm upstand. Lead salt pans post-dated the earlier ceramic salt pans, which produced characteristic 'red hills' in the area.

The simple process of evaporating brine in an open pan was carried on at Lion Salt Works in Cheshire until 1986 and is the basis of the process still used by the Maldon Crystal Salt Company near St Osyth.

Further information about the work of the Lion Salt Works Trust to restore a 19th-century salt works and reconstruct historic salt pans can be found at the trust's website at www.lionsaltworkstrust.co.uk. To discover more about the modern process used by the Maldon Crystal Salt Company, see their website at: www.maldonsalt.co.uk.

The trust would like to thank British Salt and British Lead Mills for assisting with the supply of brine and lead for this project.

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