If a Chinese salt producer had gone to Cheshire in the 1500s, he would have been appalled by the primitiveness of the technology. Shirtless men climbed down ladders into the pits, filled leather buckets with brine, and climbed out to dump the brine in wooden troughs. Then a web of pipes and gutters channeled the brine to the many salt makers in the area. But by 1636, an account of a visit to the wiches mentioned that pumps had just been installed in Nantwich to raise the brine.
