WHEN we were young, salt came in an instantly recognisable tin, with a cute little pouring “beak” and a drawing of a child chasing a chicken and pouring salt on it. Nowadays, a tin like the one illustrated here is a collector’s item!
Salt has been an essential in the human diet since the earliest hunter gatherers. Collecting salt – either from the sea or as rock salt from long dried up lakes and inland seas – has been part of the story of man for thousands of years.*
Salt used to be fine, white and free-flowing, usually presented in a ceramic salt cellar or cruet on the table, with a matching pot for fine-ground white pepper. They were seasonings with no particular character, just basic kitchen essentials.
Move on to 2025, and many of us now look for sea salt – and not just any sea salt, but a named, artisanal product – and the pepper is likely to be whole black peppercorns in a pepper grinder, perhaps with a special story and provenance, like the multi-award- winning Kampot pepper from Cambodia or Tellicherry peppercorns from Kerala.** The cruets have become pricey design statements.
Probably the best-known sea salt, and the most readily available in supermarkets, is Maldon, produced by traditional artisan methods since 1882 in the Essex coastal town.
From the other side of Britain comes another artisan product, Halen Mon, the sea salt business founded more than 25 years ago and still run by David and Alison Lea-Wilson on the island of Anglesey. Two “new” salts from the West Country are Cornish Sea Salt and Dorset Sea Salt, and with a rather more exotic provenance comes the distinctively pink Himalayan salt, much used by butchers and meat producers in their beef ageing rooms. (The best-known and probably the first prominent butcher using Himalayan salt is multi-award-winning Peter Hannan in Northern Ireland).
But without a doubt the most interesting – literally unique – British sea salt producers are Blackthorn Salt’s Gregorie Marshall, an architect by profession, and Whirly, a law, history and English graduate. They produce a salt of dazzling crystal beauty and taste from an eight-metre high blackthorn tower on the Ayrshire coast, looking out towards the isle of Arran.
There is real history here – not only does the blackthorn tower connect with the traditional (inland) salt industries of Poland and Germany, but the Scottish tower is located on Saltpans Road in Ayr – a name that nods to the site of the ancient salt pan houses of Alyson, Craigie, Bellrock and Newton. Salt was produced in many communities along the Ayrshire coast wherever they had access to the coal seams that run intermittently alongside.
Since the 1870s, generations of Gregorie’s family have been involved in the salt trade. The business began with the shipment of goods between Scotland and North America, and salt was used as ballast on return voyages. As this side of the enterprise grew, the family focussed on bringing in salts from all over the world – from as far away as Japan, Hawaii and Australia.
The historic atmosphere has even extended to the Blackthorn Salt office – an 1880s railway carriage, which they have restored and equipped as an office and a marketing suite, with fascinating illustrations and maps, and facilities to offer tastings to the occasional visitors. (Blackthorn Salt is not open to the public).
Golden Fork for Scotland
Blackthorn Salt has been gaining fame and fans among chefs and food-lovers alike for some years, but it reached a whole new level of awareness after winning a top award in the 2024 Great Taste Awards, where the Marshalls were awarded three stars and went on to win the Golden Fork for the best product from Scotland.
Whirly (it’s a family name) and Gregorie started discussing the idea of making salt at Ayr about 20 years ago. They researched, talked to university departments, scientists and engineers, looked into environmental impacts and sustainability and studied the feasibility of using a blackthorn tower, historical examples of which they had seen in mainland Europe, now used as displays for school children and tourists, and as spas.
Eventually, in 2018, they built the tower, which took a year, tested it with plain water … and then along came Covid.
They finally launched Blackthorn Salt in 2020, and the combination of the striking tower – which is the size of four double-decker buses – against the backdrop of the Isle of Arran, and the uniquely crunchy, beautiful and delicious salt crystals ensured that word soon spread that this was something really exceptional.
The process is gentle and sustainable. Clean, pure sea water, brought from Troon up the coast and regularly monitored, is dribbled through 54 wooden taps and a series of channels which are checked and adjusted daily according to the weather. It trickles slowly down through the blackthorn and is evaporated by the West Coast winds. The tannins in the blackthorn also affect the evaporation during the trickle-down.
The final stage in the panhouse is all skill and alchemy, says Whirly: “We take the now exceptionally salty brine, add our salters and their intricate knowledge of our salt, some gentle heat and nothing else …”
The sea water is on the tower for about a week, before going into the evaporating tanks in the pan house. Timings from sea to salt can vary according to the weather or the time of year, but on average, the whole process takes about two and a half weeks.
What emerges from this slow production is uniquely beautiful and tasty – the salt crystals, many in large flakes, sparkle and glint in the daylight like the biggest, multi-faceted diamonds. Crunching into one of these glittering crystals is like taking a mouth-full of icy-clear ocean water – tingling, bright, and astonishingly clean on the palate.
The blackthorn tower – also known as a graduation tower – has its origins nearly 1,500 years ago, although there have been many developments over the years. In the sixth century, the first graduation towers used straw, but this rotted and fouled the brine. As the technology matured, bushels of blackthorn became prized for their hardiness and longevity – this is still a feature: Whirly says in the years since their tower was built, one of the nine panels on one side has been replaced, and they expect to change one each year.
Blackthorn Salt is unique in using sea water – the salt produced in Germany and Poland came from underground rock salt deposits. There are still several enormous towers in Germany and Poland that no longer produce salt but are run as spas.
Within a stone’s throw of Blackthorn Salt are the sites of the Newton, Craigie and Alyson salt pans to name a few. You can also see the old Maryburgh salt panhouses (now Maryborough) which remain standing only one mile away on a golf course.
Whirly and Gregorie are proud “to have brought salt home to the west coast of Scotland” – although their method is, of course, very different. Salt has always been essential in human cooking and food preservation, and the old Scottish salt pans (like the ones that would have been used in my home town, Lymington), used coal to heat and evaporate their sea water. The process, says Whirly, produced salt that was “soggy, grey and wet (a bit like the Scottish weather).” Pretty much the opposite of Blackthorn!
Salt and smugglers
When I was a child, growing up near Lymington, we used to walk on the salt marshes – and there was an area of the town known as the Salterns. It was only years later that I put two and two together and realised that my home town had been a major salt-producing area!
One of our favourite walks as children – and even now, when we visit Lymington or Keyhaven – is the raised path that runs alongside the salt marshes between the two communities. With its powerful marshy smells, the sounds of seagulls and waterfowl, views of the Solent and the Isle of Wight, and the lure of The Gun Inn at Keyhaven at the end of the walk, it is easy to see why so many locals and visitors love it. But it is also a walk through history …
An important part of Lymington’s history is written in the place name Salterns, and remembered in the names of individual houses and cottages, and the Salterns Sailing Club. There is even a salt-water swimming pool (now rather grandly described as a lido) where I learned to swim. And there is a surviving relic of the salt industry in the old red-brick salt-boiling building.
Much of Lymington’s early prosperity was linked to the salt industry, which flourished from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century. There were salterns along the coastal marshes, from Lymington to Hurst Spit.
Salt was a valuable commodity that was extracted from sea water for a variety of important uses – to flavour food, to preserve meat, fish and vegetables and protect them from bacteria and fungi, and as part of the tanning process. From Roman times, workers were often paid partly in salt – salarium, hence salary.
Its importance is reflected in Daniel Defoe’s description, in a letter describing his travels in Wiltshire and Hampshire:
“Limington is a little, but populous sea port, standing opposite to the Isle of Weight, in the narrow part of the streight, which ships some times pass thro’, in fair weather, call’d, the Needles … This town of Limington is chiefly noted for making fine salt, which is indeed excellent good; and from whence all these south parts of England are supply’d, as well by water as by land carriage; and sometimes, tho’ not often, they send salt to London, when contrary winds having kept the northern fleets back, the price at London has been very high.”
But it’s not all good. He goes on: “I do not find they have any foreign commerce, except it be what we call smugling, and roguing; which, I may say, is the reigning commerce of all this part of the English coast, from the mouth of the Thames to the Land’s End of Cornwall.” Elsewhere he describes Lymington as “teeming with smugglers and all sorts of desperados”.
A 2012 exhibition at Lymington’s St Barbe Museum, A Taste of History: Local Food and Farming, featured the salt industry. Its use in food dates back to the end of the prehistoric hunter-gatherer period, when animals began to be farmed for meat rather than hunted and meat was often boiled. Boiling extracts salt, rendering the meat bland – adding salt improves the taste.
• For more on the story of salt, Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History is a readable and informative guide, published by Penguin Books.
** An outstanding history and introduction to the many different peppers and their uses is Christine McFadden’s Pepper, published by Absolute Press.
Pictured are the eight metre high blackthorn tower, overlooking the sea on the north Ayr coast, Whirly and Gregorie Marshall, Gregorie with new blackthorn cuttings for the tower, some of the exquisite Blackthorn Salt crystals, a blackthorn hedge in Dorset in spring 2025, and the ancient salt boiling building at Lymington.