Lion Salt Works

Lion Salt Works is a museum, voted the UK’s Best Heritage Project, and it can be found in Cheshire.

We’ve visited it as part of Heritage Open Days (it was free) and, unfortunately, we booked a volunteer led tour. It was the most boring thing I’ve been to. In a room, she stopped and said “have a look around, as we’ll spend 5 minutes here”. Lion Salt Works is a fascinating museum though and I would recommend visiting it. Maybe other tours are more engaging, but for us was a waste of time in a busy day.

The Lion Salt Works is a restored historic open-pan salt making site. Three types of salt were produced there, from table salt to salt used for agricultural purposes.

This is one of 5 pans used for producing salt.

The family that owned the salt works were thrifty and they would use and recycle all sort of things, including train railways.
Salt was produced in the area from Roman times and there are a few very old artefacts in the museum.

This is a medieval salt ship used for transport, 800 years old.

This is a wooden salt scoop from the 17th or 18th century.

Salt pan from the 2nd or 3rd century. The name of the Roman salter is still visible: Veluvius. The salt pan was made of lead.

To earn a bit more money, the salt workers would make these beautiful pieces of art by inserting ropes into salt and leave it to dry after that.

There is a beautiful and informative room in the museum, where one of the salt pans is housed. Downstairs furnaces were kept going with coal. On top the pans would boil at different temperatures. Each type of salt needs a different temperature.

These are the tubs in which the salt was molded and dried.

Some of the floor boards are new, some are old, everywhere in the museum.

This is a flash, a salt mine that collapsed and turned into a beautiful lake, filled with wildlife and flowers.

Lion Salt Works can be found at Ollershaw Lane, Marston, Northwich, Cheshire, CW9 6ES. Admission is £6.25 for adults, £4 for children and they have a free car park.