162 The Salt Industry in Cheshire. 
a lady, Miss Smith Berry, of Marbery Hall, Northwich, in the 
middle part of Cheshire. This discovery was of the upper stratum 
of salt. Mines were then started and worked in this top bed up 
to the year 1778—~z.¢., for rather more than one hundred years. 
As this bed lies only from 40 to 60 yards below the surface of the 
earth, the result was that all the Northwich town and district 
began sinking into the mines, and have indeed been steadily doing 
so for the whole of this century. Mines were afterwards made in 
the lower stratum of salt, too—160 yards below the surface. This 
stratum was found to be more free from impurities in the shape of 
clays and marls, etc., than the upper ones. At the present time 
the mines in the lower stratum are the only ones being worked, 
all those in the upper one having been abandoned. 
Besides this rock salt, which can be obtained only by mining, 
salt also exists in Cheshire in a totally different form—namely, 
natural brine. This natural brine is the source of almost all our 
ordinary white salts, which are, of course, obtained by evaporation 
and crystallisation. Natural brine was used in Cheshire for 
obtaining salt as early as the time of the Romans and: Saxons, 
long before rock salt was discovered there at all, and leaden pans 
have been found measuring 6 by 4 feet, which were in all probabi- 
lity used by the Romans for that purpose. 
The brine is found in this way :—When a shaft is sunk down 
to the flagstone, and the flagstone is bored through, zz some places 
brine rushes up, though many bores have been made without any 
brine appearing. ‘This seems to indicate that the brine exists in 
streams between the flagstone and the upper stratum of salt, but 
does not cover the whole surface of the salt. 
Brine formerly flowed to the surface of the land in a few 
places. There is record of its having done so as late as the reign 
of Edward I., and even now there is a field in Nantwich, near the 
middle of Cheshire, where a bottle of it was actually collected by 
one of the present mine-owners a very short time ago. Possibly, 
it might be more often found at the surface than it is, if people 
only searched for it. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly lower in 
level than formerly, for it is known that at Northwich it has fallen 
in three centuries from the surface to the present level, 40 or 50 
yards down, and at Winsford, where salt has only been made one 
hundred and fifty years, it has fallen from 15 to 50 yards beneath. 
The reason why it is lower is supposed to be this :—Before 
brine was used by man, the sandstone basin in the lower parts was 
probably soaked with it, and any excess flowed, as it still does in 
some places, into the river. But when it was used largely for 
manufacture, what was already in the soil gradually became 
exhausted. This first happened in 1875, when a failure in brine 
was noticed in all shafts. The old stores being exhausted, the 
