Sketches
La
fontaine salée
Because the spring has always risen laden with salt – more salt per litre than the waters of the Mediterranean – there has always been trade here. People can't live without sodium chloride, especially in summer when the snow is all gone or melted in the icehouse and fresh meat rots before it can be smoked or air-dried.
So, for countless years, the water has been boiled away and the salt scraped up and sold, with or without the co-operation of the excise men.
To boil off the water, copious trees have fallen under the axe. But green wood is heavy to haul, so charcoal burners set up in the forest, cooking the timber down in dense piles covered with mud to starve the fire of oxygen and create a more portable lightweight fuel. And they also took that fuel into the towns and villages.
Because of the salt water running over the ground, samphire – a plant associated with seaside marshland – has been harvested for food or burnt and its ash used in the production of antique glass, thick and strangely liquid so that, ten years on, under the influence of gravity, the bottom of each pane was thicker than the top. The excise men wanted a cut of that, too.
And in amongst the craft and trade of these busy artisans, miners delved for shiny black jet and translucent amber. Then they polished up the jewels from the ground and sold them for jewellery, trinkets or charms.
