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. AEons 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.
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[Illustration]