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
Nantwich 82-seat Nantwich Players Theatre, which puts on about five plays a year. The name of Jan Palach Avenue in the south of the town commemorates the self-immolation of a student in Czechoslovakia in 1969. Nantwich is on the Cheshire Plain, on the banks of the River Weaver. The Shropshire Union Canal runs to the west of the town on an embankment, crossing the A534 via an iron aqueduct. The basin is a popular mooring for visitors to the town. It joins the Llangollen Canal at Hurleston to the north. The town is approximately four miles south-west of Crewe and 20