POSTCARD FROM CHESHIRE

Bob Barton finds out about subsidence, timber-framed buildings, boat lifts, waterways and Lewis Carroll, taking it all with a pinch of salt

Did you know you can make milk last longer by adding a pinch of salt? There are, of course, many other uses for this essential mineral. I’ve discovered that much of this county is built on it. The Lion Salt Works (01606 275066, lionsaltworks. westcheshiremuseums.co.uk) was a highlight of my short break in Cheshire. Its miners never went underground but that didn’t stop their jobs being tough, hot and carried out in grim conditions. They also had strange job titles, straight out of Willy Wonka. Think lumpers, lofters and wallers.

Situated near Northwich, next to the Trent and Mersey Canal, a hotch-potch of buildings make up the works which were owned by six generations of the same family. Closure came in 1986. Little has changed since then – they house a characterful, salt-infused museum introducing a little-known slice of social history. Step by step, I was taken through the arcane process that created the end product: blocks of pure white salt. It was packaged, loaded on to trains and barges, then exported as far as Africa.

A curator pointed me towards a “nodding donkey” that performed the first stage. It pumped brine from a former tropical lagoon deep underground. In the “pan house”, red light glowed from four coal furnaces. I was enveloped in clouds of “steam”, as mannequins of bare-chested men raked crystals from the boiling saline. Dante’s Inferno had nothing on this. Then, it was a case of navigating wooden walkways to confront rusting machinery, such as a crushing mill that mashed the lumps.