SOUTH Cumbria has seen whole industries – such as mining and iron and steel production - disappear through the decades with little left to show they were ever there.

An insight into how Walney’s former salt industry would have been operated is provided by a £10m preservation project in Cheshire.

Little survives of the Walney Salt Works – which closed in 1909 – but the Lion Salt Works, at Marston, near Northwich, is now attracting thousands of visitors to see how a basic of daily life used to be made.

Walney salt was a chance discovery in the late 1880s when bore holes were sunk in search of coal south of Biggar village.

After a few false starts, large-scale production started in 1897 with a complex of buildings which included an evaporating plant and 24 salt pans.

The site was capable of producing 50,000 tons of salt a year.

Salt has been made at a variety of places on the Cumberland and North Lancashire coast, such as Millom, Ulverston and Piel island – mostly by letting sea water dry out naturally in ponds.

The Lion Salt Works was opened in 1894 by John Thompson Junior and his son Henry in the coal yard of the Red Lion Hotel.

It closed in 1986 and the only surviving open pan salt works in Cheshire has now been restored in a project supported by the Heritage Lottery fund.

It opened to the public in June last year.

Outiside is a steam-powered pump, referred to as a “nodding donkey”, which pumped a salt-rich solution of brine from a depth of 40m.

The brine was sent to pan houses – a timber shed covering a large iron salt pan which was heated from beneath.

As the water evaporated, pure salt crystals started to form.

The pans were in use 24 hours a day, six days a week and cleaned on the seventh day.

Lumpmen, who worked stripped to the waist, raked out and lifted the still wet salt into tubs and took it to the stove house, or hot house.

A two-week process fully dried out the lumps before they could go to a warehouse, ready to be cut, crushed and packed for customers all over the world.

A crushing mill with two pairs of large-toothed barrels would reduce blocks to use as table salt.

The Lion Salt Works took one ton of coal to make two tons of salt from brine which was eight times saltier than sea water and was pumped to the surface from layers of natural rock salt.

This was laid down during the Triassic period from 225 to 190 million years ago when the area would have been a vast, shallow, inland sea.

The Lion Salt Works, on Ollershaw Lane, Marston, near Northwich is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10.30am to 5pm and from November until 4pm.