| T. Birtles, photo.] | [Warrington. |
But the mining of the upper bed of salt by man does not account for the subsidences here recorded. The name of the dangerous miner is "water." When water reaches the upper bed of salt it dissolves it as water does snow. Water can take in 26 degrees of salt and no more, and then it is called brine. Underneath Northwich is a sea of brine which lies on the top of the upper bed of salt rock. From this brine white salt is made by a process of evaporation, and that is why all over Northwich you see numbers of pumping stations which pump up the brine as fast almost as it is made. As the brine is taken out fresh water flows in and takes up its 26 degrees of salt. In this way the great cavities under Northwich which cause all the subsidences are made; they will grow bigger and bigger as long as the pumping up of brine is continued.
Truly Northwich lives and moves and has its being in salt, and promises to be buried in it too.
Brine pumping is the source of a terrible injustice. A man may buy a piece of land large enough to erect a pumping station, and if on that spot he can tap the brine there is nothing to prevent him from drawing brine from any part of Northwich. And though his neighbour's house is engulfed in the process, and though he is ruined thereby, he can secure no compensation. If you were to mine salt or coal under your neighbour's house you could be brought to book, but not if you take water, salt or fresh.
Such was the law till a few months ago. But after a tremendous fight a bill has been passed which gives a Compensation Board power to levy not more than three-pence a ton on all brine pumped at Northwich. This levy is to go to the compensation of those whose houses and property have suffered. But at present not a penny has been paid and in no case will a penny ever be paid for all the damage done before the passing of the Act. Such is the tragedy of salt getting.
Illustration: OUR ARTIST'S WAKING DREAM OF A STREET IN NORTHWICH.]
Northwich has been called the salt metropolis of the world, and as becomes a metropolis it is unique. It has a Salt Museum, the only one in existence, which contains the finest collection of Indian and American salts in the country. It also contains some very interesting exhibits. Among them are a pair of boots and an old broom-head which were left in an old salt mine for fifteen years. They had not much beauty when they were left, but Nature has made them exquisitely beautiful, for they are encased in salt crystals which were formed upon them in those fifteen years.
No one can go down a salt mine without asking, How did this salt come here? And no one can fail to be impressed by the answer. Æons before the footfall of man was heard upon the earth there stretched across Cheshire a great salt lake; and under the hot sun of a semi-tropical age the salt crystallised out of the water and rested at the bottom of the lake. How many years it is since the first layer was deposited can hardly be imagined, for it was formed under deep waters, while now it is over 300 feet beneath the earth's crust. But there are few finer fields for the exercise of the imagination than in trying to conceive the vastness of time and change which have elapsed since then. And when one does realise something of the eternity of that time one ceases to wonder that Northwich has fits when its heart of salt is taken from it.
