The gelding picks its way across the stubble.  The light is dying fast and Johne Stein has a way to go to reach Craigton and the cheer of firelight. 

The sandbar between Clackmannan Pow and Alloa is dour against the fluid light on the river as horse and rider follow the shoreline West.  Cinders glow red beneath the long cast-iron pans ahead of them.

A few women, thirled for life to the salt pans[i],  smoor the ashes and tidy around the girnel under the gaze of the Earl’s baillie.   Steam rises from the liquor as it cools.  

Tonight and tomorrow, specks and grains of salt will precipitate gradually from the liquid.  On Monday, the crystals will be larger than those produced through the week when the pans are boiled dry.  Collected in the morning, before the pans are filled again and the fires lit, those bigger grains sell at a premium, providing fancies for the tables of bonnet lairds and rich merchants.    Not enough to recoup the loss of a day’s production but it seems an irony that the Creator works on through the Sabbath despite himself.

The salt workers are mostly miners’ women.  They straighten up as Johne approaches, their wooden shovels and rakes clutched close, before shrinking back onto the heaps of pan-wood to let him pass.

The door of the girnel opens and the gauger emerges, turning to lock the door of the bond behind him.

In days past, Johne would have walked the distance from Craigton to the still-house and back but, at sixty, he prefers to ride.  His joints ache and have stiffened as years of mist thickened the air along the Firth.  God has blessed the Steins with robust constitutions but this ague marks the coming of the end; it did for his father and his father before him.

The Steins have leased the land about Craigton for generations as kindly landward tenants of the Bruces of Clackmannan and, more recently, the Crown.

Forty years ago, the rights and revenues of the saltpans and coalpits, along with the enserfed miners and their women, were held by the monastery at Kennetpans.  Now, the lands and their perquisites have been transferred by the King to John Erskine, the Earl of Mar so that Johne has become a tenant of both Bruce and Erskine lairds.  Two proprietors to please and flatter.

He edges his horse closer to the pans, anxious for the warmth from the glowing coals. He has spent his afternoon warming, inside and out, in the still-house.  Whereas the Earl retains the revenues from the saltpans and the coal-pits, he offered up the stills in which the brothers of the Monastery used to make aqua vitae for a steep rent.  Johne scrabbled to raise the coin, relying on the family’s reputation as good tenants – regular and never in arrears – to secure the lease.  

A puckle silver and a wheen of copper turn Craigton’s barley into spirits which, domestic use apart, convert to muckle silver.  Alchemy of a sort.

By the nearest pan, the women seem to glow in the ember-light.  They are fierce, unruly women, Amazons in filthy rags, their faces streaked with the blood they skim from the surface of the brine.

Johne spurs his horse closer. Beneath the rising vapours and the red scum, the cooling brine is viscid.  Soon it will turn milky thick.

“Good evening, Johne Stein,” says the Baillie, casting a sideways glance towards the approaching Gauger.  “The nichts are fair draain’ in.”

“Ay. Still.  Least ye hae haet an licht.”

“Ay, cosy toastie, so it is.  Whit brings ye in aboot?”

Johne unloops the jug of whisky tied to his saddle and leans down to offer a dram to the Baillie. An hour before, he watched the pure clear spirit drip drip drip from the alembic and trickle through the worm into the jug.   His Grieve at the still-house learned the craft from his father, an Augustinian monk.  The man shares that knowledge cannily but Johne has already expanded his enterprise from one pot-still to three.

“Ay,” the Baillie says, “Fine stuff!”  He wipes his lips then takes a second sip.  The Excise Man’s footsteps are almost upon them.  The women return their attention to raking the ashes.  They will be wanting home, wishing the men would not dither, drink and gossip.

Johne retrieves the jug, takes another charge, though he has been sipping new made whisky for the last two hours, enjoying the creeping comfortable numbness as he watched his men work, warming himself near the coals that heat the stills.

The Excise Man is a dour, thin streak of a fellow. He eyes the pair of them and the jug, rankling at his exclusion from their communion. 

“Weel, is the saut aa there an accountit fir?” Johne asks.

“Seems tae be.  Ay.”

“Naething gonnae add savour tae yer broth this Sabbath?”

“No.  Never.”

“Would ye like a nip?”

The Gauger hesitates, wary that if he agrees he might be refused.  There is no duty on whisky.  It is salt that is taxed to the hilt.

“Jist een noo,” Johne laughs as he offers him the jug and, dutifully, the Gauger only takes  one sip.  He is surprised at the strength of the spirit. Gasps.

Johne says.  “I hear John Erskine is oor new proprietor.  I wunner what the chiel did tae earn that?”

“Erskine, ay. Some service nae doot,” the Baillie says, enjoying one last chug before he offers up the jug again.

“Nae doot.” 

It is almost forty years since Master Knox died.  After years of blasting trumps at his harlot Queen, Johne wonders what the old man makes of her son, sitting on his throne in London, absent from Scotland and favouring his English subjects over his own. Levies are no longer raised with every man in Clackmannan mustering to the standard.  Order lies in the courts now.  The Sheriff has built a tolbooth in Clackmannan to hold his courts and ward malefactors and transgressors awaiting justice.  The new order is good for business after decades of unrest.  Johne sends whisky to Edinburgh and beyond.  Its manufacture is no longer for ‘medicinal purposes’. 

But taxes and excise! Who do the Gauger’s beady eyes serve?

“Nae doot I’ll see ye at the kirk imorn then.  What will Reverend Wright edify us wi this time?” Johne asks. “What new sin hiz he conjured up fur us, eh?  Should ye no be getting back?” he asks the Excise Man.  Never a smile on that billie and still red about the eyes from all his coughing and spluttering.

Johne’s horse is restive from the nip of salt.  He feels his age is coming for him now and the sampling of his wares back in the still-room has made him weary.  He lashes the jug to the saddle and nods goodnight to the Baillie.

As he turns the horse inland, he wonders at these magic crafts the Monks had custody of.  That clear Forth water – brackish – yields big solid grains of rock-salt.  That barley brew yields a spiritous essence.

The salt that makes their meat flavourful: those that can afford the salt tax.

The spirit that makes cares lighten and laughter flow.

And all from coal carved from the ingoe pits, black rock that burns and heat that boils and, in the boiling, creates new properties, new stuff.  Queer when you think about it.  How stuff transmutes, taking on new properties that were not there before.

Back in the still-room, his three pots cool as the ashes chill beneath the base.  There is no such thing as Sabbath Whisky.  Cooling yields only a thin spirit, useless, the Greive says, for anything but recharging the pot.  Wasted heat.

Yet the cooling of the brine liquor yields silver for the salt-master.  Perhaps, Johne thinks, one day his sons will be salt masters too.  Or coal masters.  No longer simply gudemen, almost the bottom of the heap, paying rents in grain and butter, cheese and wool. 

He glances back at the bloody witches gazing at him from amidst the steam and smoke.  Not quite the bottom of the heap then. He hopes the Reverend Wright’s sermon will be entertaining.  Back at the farmhouse at Craigton, Marion will be wondering what is keeping him. 

© John Bolland 2026

Notes:

[i] An Act of Parliament of 1606 bonded saltmakers and coalminers to their respective saltmasters and coal masters for life, essentially re-introducing serfdom to Scotland.

[ii] Poor coals and dross which will heat next week’s production.

[iii] The History of Clackmannan

[iv] The Forth was never the cleanest of rivers and so the water was first tipped into a deep pond called the reservoir. There it was allowed to remain until the deposits had settled, before it was finally transferred to one of the seven metre long, four metre wide, shallow, oblong, iron, salt pans.

Despite this precaution, some impurities always remained in the water. At the stage in the operation therefore, a bucket of blood obtained from the local slaughter house was always tipped into the pan. As the river water boiled, the blood thickened and produced a scum like that formed when making jam. As this scum, carrying the impurities, rose to the surface, it was the women workers’ unpleasant task to lean out over the bubbling, boiling solution to skim it off.

This was done using long handled wooden rakes which conducted less heat than ones made from iron would have done. As they lent out over the steaming, cauldron-like pan, they became streaked with blood and some of the women salt workers were nicknamed the Bloody Witches of Cuffabouts, after the place to the east of Bo’ness, where several of the town’s many salt pans were situated. Salt From the Shores of the Forth – Lothian Life the magazine for Edinburgh and the Lothians