Along the Moors - Wappenshall

Salt Springs Eternal

Kinley Farm The Saltworks Were Located To The East Of These buildings

By the time Wappenshall acquired its reputation as an important transport hub for east Shropshire, the locality had already been a key centre for at least one other local industry — salt production. At Kingley Wych, a little way east of Kinley Farm, two saltworks were established by the early 1700s to utilise the considerable outpourings of a local brine spring which was reckoned, by contemporary accounts at least, to produce up to 5000 gallons of brine on a daily basis.

One of these saline-related enterprises belonged to the Trustees of Preston Hospital and was fittingly known as the ‘Charity Salt Works’. It proved to be something of a short-lived endeavour and appears to have closed by 1736, only 30 years or so after it had first opened for business. A far more successful venture was undertaken by the influential Charlton family, of nearby Apley Castle, whose own saltworks at Kinley survived for most of the 18th Century. The brine was extracted with a horse-powered pump from a pit and stored in cisterns, before being boiled in large iron pans, where blood was added to the mix in order to speed evaporation. Although salt production had ceased by 1799, the works buildings remained intact until the 1960s, while the brine spring itself was filled in about 1970.