miscellany

... Salterns. They exist everywhere along the seaside and up our estauries, generally as a flat sea marsh known only by their name. Three 'salt pans' are recorded and valued in Domesday Book at Eling, Dibden and Hordle, but it was in the Middle Ages when all the great houses killed off their cattle in the autumn and salted them down for winter use, that they flourished most, and the traffic inland is marked by the numerous Saltways and Salters' Lanes that are found in old maps and still survive.

Mr. Heywood Sumner has mapped and described two of them in his Earthworks of the New Forest - the great one near Lymington which is said to have paid £50,000 in duty to the Echequer in one year in the 18th century, and the smaller one west of Needsore Point at the mouth of the Beaulieu River. Probably it served the Abbey. But the most ancient in our county was only discovered about two years ago near Warsash by the finding of a large quantity of broken red pottery of peculiar and unknown character to any of us who saw it, but now recognised as identical with that found in the mysterious Red Hills on the Essex coast, and these are now accepted as being Roman Salterns.