A HISTORY OF SALT-MAKING IN ESSEX. 195
concentrated by evaporation. The resulting brine was then
further reduced and the salt crystallised by artificial heat.
The salt made here in later times (including the present) has
been that known as "white salt"—that is, salt made by boiling
sea-water by means of artificial heat. This latter process is
now carried on nowhere in England (so far as I am aware),
except at our one remaining salt factory, having been super-
seded everywhere else by the making of salt from rock-salt.
It seems probable that our Essex coast offers greater facilities
for making salt from sea-water than any other part of the coast
of England. In the first place, we have many extensive,
shallow, narrow-mouthed estuaries, creeks, and inlets of the sea
—together, probably, far larger, both in number and in area, than
those of any other county. It is easy to understand that salt in
large quantities must be deposited by evaporation on the
extensive mud-flats and saltings which exist in and around
these inlets, and that this salt must be taken up in solution
and re-deposited, again and again, by each tide—twice, in fact,
in every twenty-four hours—till the water becomes exceptionally
salt. Further, these inlets lie on the east coast, where the
rainfall is far less than on the west, and the water in them is
likely, in consequence, to be less diluted by rain and river-water
than the water in similar inlets lying on other coasts where the
rainfall is greater. This comparatively-light rainfall and the
extent, shallowness, and narrowness of our estuaries and inlets
seem likely to cause the water in them to be of higher
salinity than the water of other English inlets of the kind. It
would be interesting if some of our chemical members would
conduct experiments with a view to showing whether this is so or
not, and, if so, to what extent.
However this may be, nearly all our Essex salt-works were
situated, not on the open sea-coast, but on the shores of estuaries
and inlets, and generally near their heads. Further, in Norman
times (as will be seen from what follows), salt-pans were thickest
around those inlets of the sea (as Hamford Water, The Ray,
Salcot Creek, and Tollesbury Creek) which were inlets merely:
not river estuaries. In these, probably, the water is of even
higher salinity than that in the estuaries, as it is not diluted by
river water. This is, no doubt, especially the case with Hamford
Water, which is of very considerable extent, while its mouth is