This termination _wich_ is itself curiously significant, as Canon Isaac
Taylor has shown, of the necessary connection between salt and the sea.
The earliest known way of producing salt was of course in shallow pans
on the sea-shore, at the bottom of a shoal bay, called in Norse and
Early English a wick or wich; and the material so produced is still
known in trade as bay-salt. By-and-by, when people came to discover the
inland brine-pits and salt mines, they transferred to them the familiar
name, a wich; and the places where the salt was manufactured came to be
known as wych-houses. Droitwich, for example, was originally such a
wich, where the droits or dues on salt were paid at the time when
William the Conqueror's commissioners drew up their great survey for
Domesday Book. But the good, easy-going mediaeval people who gave these
quaint names to the inland wiches had probably no idea that they were
really and truly dried-up bays, and that the salt they mined from their
pits was genuine ancient bay-salt, the deposit of an old inland sea,
evaporated by slow degrees a countless number of ages since, exactly as
the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake are getting evaporated in our own
time.
Such, nevertheless, is actually the case. A good-sized Caspian used to
spread across the centre of England and north of Ireland in triassic
times, bounded here and there, as well as Dr. Hull can make out, by the
Welsh Mountains, the Cheviots, and the Donegal Hills, and with the Peak
of Derbyshire and the Isle of Man standing out as separate islands from
its blue expanse.
Pages:
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342