96
THE "SALTING MOUNDS" OF ESSEX.
By H. STOPES, F.G.S.
[Read December 20th, 1884.]
To most relics of antiquity, whether consisting of portable articles,
or merely serving as demonstrations of ancient occupation (such as
earthworks, etc.), an actual or relative date can be assigned with
more or less close approximation to exactitude. In the case of pre-
historic remains, such chronology is merely relative, consisting in the
determination of their place in the sequence of disconnected items
elucidating the course of events in the earliest periods of human
existence, whilst their increasing nearness in point of time gradually
leads us through the mythical and legendary into the historic—no
sharply definable line separating archaeology from history.
But the interesting remains to which I direct attention seem to
form an exception to this rule. They may be of the remotest anti-
quity, and, on the other hand, it is just possible that they are of
comparatively modern origin; and it is with the view less of eliciting
further information already possessed than of inciting some members
of the Club to extend research into this question that I have put
together the following particulars.
The "Salting Mounds" were so called by me some years ago, at
a time when, so far as I can ascertain, no attention, scientific or
otherwise, had been directed to them.
It is desirable to state, in the first place, that "saltings" are areas
of land between the range of high water at spring and neap tides
respectively. Such land may be the denuded and weathered slope
of the material of which the inland area is constituted, but more
generally has been formed by the deposition of mud from the tidal
waters.
The coarse sedge, saltwort, and other vegetation which spreads
over the surface of the mud as soon as it reaches such a level as
allows intratidal drainage and evaporation to produce comparative
solidity, not only arrests all floating substances, but, by checking
the fall of the silt-laden waters of each tide, retains the solid ingre-
dients, and by these accretions, continuing for long periods, the mud
rises in places nearly to the high-water level of spring tides.
The Blackwater and the Colne, rising near each other in the
interior of our county, but following widely separate courses from the
neighbourhood of Coggeshall to the coast, reach the sea at the same