Talks – The Salt Industry of the Adur Valley

By Janet Pennington, 8th October 2021

Janet grew up in Steyning, as the daughter of the renowned Sussex archaeologist, Eric Holden. He was interested in the history of the local salt production and had begun in his lifetime to identify the places it was produced locally in the Adur estuary. This area of old tidal flats, like others in Sussex, has now been ‘inned’, that is, drained and turned into pasture fields. To illustrate the former scene she showed us an etching of the estuary in 1645 and William Budgen’s map of 1724, showing the river’s entrance to the sea at Shoreham, which depicted ‘new’ and ‘old’ salts. She reminded us that before the ‘Norfolk Bridge’ was built across it in the 1780s (downstream from the modern A27 flyover), people travelling between Brighton and Chichester had to use a ferry to cross the river. The Sussex Pad public house on A 27 at the west bank is so called because the road was a ‘padway’ or ‘pedway’, meaning a public foot road. The new Norfolk bridge became a toll bridge, restricted to foot passengers, horses and, in time, bikes.

The old estuary flowed up to the ancient Saxon town of Steyning and the small villages such as Coombes and Botolph’s on the west bank used to be at the water’s edge. At Combes, for example, one can still see strange marks in a field and bare patches where the grass doesn’t grow properly. These are the signs that salt used to be collected here.  At Erringham on the east bank the former saltworks were discovered because they stood proud even when the river was in flood.

Some of the mounds, or ‘salterns’ dotted around the estuary in living memory used to be 10 feet high by 20 feet wide, but more recently they have been extensively ploughed out. The best map for showing the extent of the former alluvial flats is the modern, coloured geological map. The push for agricultural ‘improvement’ was only partially successful because the crops just won’t grow where the soil is too salty. The remains that were still visible to the eye were plotted by Janet’s father, working with Dr. Tim Hudson in the 1970s when the latter was researching the Shoreham and Bramber area for Volume VI of the (Sussex) Victoria County History. They found that each estuary-side village had their spot for salt production. Sele Priory near Upper Beeding, before it was dissolved by King Henry VIII, received many of its rents as payments in salt. We saw a photo taken when the sun was low and the salterns stood proud against the sky.

Salt was collected as a silty brown sludge when the tide was out, then sieved, rinsed and boiled until all that was left was the actual salt. But it kept its slightly brown colour and though it enjoyed a good local market, and it could be used as a commodity to offset rent and debts, it was not the most refined.  As early as the 1300s the local ‘Shoreham’ industry was undercut by a better class of salt being produced in salt pans in France and imported through the Sussex ports. She showed us an illustration of one of them, an extensive complex of proper raised salt pans.  Mounds of salt could be viewed at the adjacent Salt Museum.

Salt had been an essential commodity. In all life-times prior to our own it has been the only means of preserving fish and other food products so as to store them and use them throughout the entire winter as a vital source of nutrition. Every household would have a wooden salt box, kept in a dry place so as to keep the salt dry for use. Janet’s father felt that it was important to preserve these remains of this key local industry. He had identified an area on the eastern side of the river, near the site of the former Sele Priory, where several old salterns (the heaps of old siftings) are still visible in the landscape. After mounting a local successful campaign,  the area was set apart as an attraction, with information boards about its history that the public could visit and enjoy. Janet ended her talk by demonstrating the central part that salt still plays in our lives by showing us some interesting examples of older and modern pottery salt cellars. We thanked her warmly and some of us made a note to put a visit to her father’s saltern sanctuary on our ‘to do’ list.