Open-pan salt making from lead using wood as a fuel. In Britain they established towns for salt production at Droitwich in Worcestershire, and Nantwich, Middlewich and Northwich in Cheshire. In the early Middle Ages these developed into the 'wich' towns of Cheshire. Small 'wich' houses containing several lead pans to evapourate the brine into salt, clustered around brine springs within each of the towns. The open-pan process continued largely unchanged throughout the medieval period. A 17th-century German wood-cut by Georgius Agricola shows the process in detail. Excavated evidence has uncovered wooden rakes to draw salt crystals to the side of the pan, and
Crown Hotel, Nantwich Crown Hotel, Nantwich The Crown Hotel, also known as the Crown Inn, is a timber-framed, black-and-white hotel and public house located at 24 High Street in the town of Nantwich in Cheshire, England. The present building dates from shortly after 1583. One of three buildings in Nantwich to be listed at grade I, the listing describes the Crown Hotel as "an important late C16 building." The existing hotel was built on the site of an earlier inn of the same name, destroyed in the Great Fire of Nantwich of 1583. This appears to have been constructed on an earlier industrial