An Early Eighteenth Century Scottish Saltwork: Arran, c.1710-1735

Historians have paid little attention to Scotland's salt industry. The few physical traces of its existence have not been seriously examined and interpreted by industrial archaeologists. This article presents some new material about saltmaking on the west coast of Scotland but more importantly it argues that the site under review here, on Arran in the Firth of Clyde, represents the earliest known upstanding remains of the type of saltwork which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ranged along both shores of the river Forth, from where the bulk of Scotland's salt production came.