From the Romans to The Middle Ages

• The Peopling of the district
• Brigantes to Boldon Book
• Chapel and Charters
• The Salters Lane

further histories

• Pesspool Hall
• John Duck

then and now

• Past Times
• Colliery
• Railway
• Modern

Tyneside Salt Making

"While it flourished it did so because certain temporary advantages outweighed enormous natural handicaps; the industry faltered as soon as these advantages were lost.
The natural handicaps in question included the inability of the Shields saltmakers to produce good-quality salt. Salt made from sea-water, unlike brine or rock salt, contains significant quantities of calcium and magnesium compounds which give the product a bitter taste and make it an inefficient preservative.
Newcastle salt was grudgingly accepted as kitchen salt but neither as fine table salt nor for curing provisions that were to be kept for any length of time.
Further, contemporaries complained that its faults were exacerbated by careless or mistaken production techniques.
Both the strength and texture of salt depend on the size of the grains, and boiling sea-water rapidly produced fine-grained salt which soaked up moisture readily and was considered inferior to the larger, coarser grained salt made by slower evaporation.
It also tended to be extremely dirty by the time it came to market since it was made over open hearths and carried in ships which also acted as colliers. These shortcomings reduced its appeal to those customers who could afford to pay for quality and restricted it to a smaller market and lower price range.
But Newcastle salt was not merely bitter, weak, dirty, and liquescent- the process required enormous quantities of fuel to extract the 3 per cent of salt dissolved in sea-water."

The Decline and Fall of the Tyneside Salt Industry, 1660-1790: A Re-examination

- Joyce Ellis

Salters Lane

Salt as well as agriculture played an important part in Haswell's history. Before the landscape became scarred with the slag heaps, and the smoke and grime of the coal mines, Haswell was a peaceful hamlet set in rural surroundings. Surrounded by rough moorland grazing covered in heath and heather, the village was also centered along either side of one of the main arteries of the industrial Durham landscape of the time. It was an industry that was indespensible to its age yet one which is now generally remembered only in old documents or on a signpost by the road side.

Even in pre-Roman times the great pans where the salt was obtained by the simple process of evaporation from sea water had been situated in the estuaries of the Tyne and Wear.

The difficulty of freezing meat or fish as a method of preservation meant that salt was a valuable commodity, essential to a nation's development, and saltways were developed to transport the product inland from the coastal saltings.

Records of 1489 show land and two salt pans being sold in South Shields. By 1768 the town had 200 salt pans where sea water was boiled away to leave the salt. Although importing had been tried, times of unrest meant that supplies were stopped, and even when it was available, the price of 10s a bushel, along with heavy duties forced us to fall back on our own resources. Thousands of men were employed in the process and in South Shields alone the duty on salt-boiling amounted to no less than £80,000 per year. Thus we became exporters rather than importers and the North East coast was ideally situated for the purpose. The ports were there and the fires needed to produce the salt were fed by the waste coal which was abundant in the area.

Roads as we know them were non existent and the 'Salters' roads were either lanes or tracks. The lane between Monkwearmouth to Wingate (and on to what is now Teeside), travelling through Haswell, was described as being ten feet deep in places and, for the greater part of the way, was six feet or less in breadth.

The lanes were travelled by pack horses. Galloways, hardy pack horses travelling in gangs of 12 to 14 horses, were each equipped with a broad webbing belt with great panniers strapped on either side. They each carried a load of up to 130lbs, walking in single file because of the restricted space, with the 'bell horse' at their head. The 'bell horse' wore a collar to which seven bells were attached serving the purpose of giving fair warning to gangs approaching from the opposite direction so that sufficiently wide places could be selected to allow passage.

The Galloways were usually owned by farmers who engaged local men as drivers. It was an arduous occupation, especially in winter when the tracks were either deep in mud or covered in ice. Sometimes the journeys would last longer than a day, but usually the load would be passed on to other 'gangs' until they reached their final destination.

Once the salt was loaded at South Shields, the gang proceeded along Tunstall Lane towards Silksworth and then to Haswell. This was a convenient resting place before moving on south towards fording the Tees near Middleton-One-Row and from there into Yorkshire.

The North East enjoyed a rich and lucrative virtual monopoly on the salt trade until extensive salt beds were discovered in Cheshire and from then on the trade began to decline as the steam engine outmoded the pack horse.

In 1696, 143 salt pans were in operation in South Shields; in 1834 only two remained, producing about 200 tons per annum to supply local demand. By 1852 not one single person is recorded as being a salt-boiler in Sunderland. Different methods of producing salt were being successfully exploited and these new methods contributed further to the demise of the trade. The days of producing salt by evaporation and transporting it along the Salter's Lane were numbered.

Salters Way is a road apparently of very great antiquity, which may be traced along the whole eastern coast of the County of Durham, and is, I believe, known under the same or very similar appellations near the coast in several parts of the island. - Surtees

Salt pans

"Tynesiders made good use of their mineral riches. Coal is one of the best sources of heat and energy known to us and where there is coal, there is often brine-rich water. When this is left to evaporate in the Sun or heated in shallow pans, it leaves deposits of salt, yet another valuable commodity. So valuable, in fact, that people were once paid wages in salt. The word "salary" derives from the the Latin word "salarium", which is how Rome occasionally paid its troops. By the beginning of the 18th century, there were more than 170 salt pans operating on Tyneside, most of them in North and South Shields at the mouth of the river (some street names were derived from the industry, just off Commercial Road is a small road named "Pan Bank" and off that there was a "Pan Yard ") The Tyneside salt industry was an intriguing one. Most of the raw material, the brine water, came from local mines. The so called Salt pans in which the brinewater was cooked were long, shallow vessels, usually between 2 1/2 ft to 3ft deep, made from cast-iron boiler plate riveted together with angle irons and set up over brickwork flues. The dimensions varied from 25ft by 20ft to 135ft by 30ft. The smaller ones were heated at 107c to produce fine grained salt for domestic use. The biggest of the pans were heated at 40-50c and produced rougher "bay" salt. In between, there was a grade known as fishery salt which, as its name suggests, was used for salting fish at sea. It was a simple but effective chemical process and it lasted in various parts of Britain until huge seams of underground rock salt were found in places like Cheshire and Barrow in Furness. By the end of the 19th century, rock salt had swamped the British market and Tynesides salt pans had more or less ceased to exist."

Alistair Moffat & George Rosie: " Tyneside - a history of Newcastle & Gateshead from Earliest Times"