Couple reviving Ayrshire salt-making complete huge new tower of thorns
A husband and wife duo on the Ayrshire coast are significantly stepping up their efforts to revive a historic salt-making tradition with the completion of a magnificent new graduation tower.
Blackthorn Salt founders Gregorie and Whirly Marshall are celebrating the peak of their second such structure, filled with thousands of blackthorn bushes.
This latest addition measures an impressive 12 meters high and 25 meters long, considerably larger than its original eight-metre tower.
Innovative graduation towers draw seawater upwards through pipes, allowing it to flow slowly downwards through a dense network of barbs. The large surface area of the plants, combined with the supporting winds characteristic of the Ayrshire coastline, facilitates the evaporation of water, allowing it to condense into salt water as it circulates through the tower. Salt is then extracted from this concentrated brine.
Marshalls’ site is unique in the UK in using this method, and examples of graduation towers around the world are rare.
They say their rigs produce “super high” quality salt more sustainably than other methods.
Their first rig started producing salt regularly in 2021 and they saw that the product was in demand.
Ms Marshall told the Press Association: “It’s been an incredible journey; it’s fantastic that people in Scotland and around Britain love and appreciate our salt and understand why it’s produced the way it is.”
Construction of the tower required nearly three years of on-off work, including the laborious securing of blackthorn bushes into place.
There are approximately 6,000 blackthorn bushes attached to the new tower, which act as a “huge washing line” to slowly evaporate seawater.
Ms Marshall said: “They also give it flavour. The crystals have each of the five basic flavours.”
He said the graduation tower method is much more sustainable than other ways of producing salt because it requires very little energy to evaporate the water.
Historically, there were numerous salt fields along the Ayrshire coast that came and went over the centuries, some dating back to the Middle Ages.
These often burned coal to heat seawater and produced primitive salt in pre-industrial times.
