Scottish Couple Builds 40-Foot Tower to Make Ancient Salt

Gregorie and Whirly Marshall are bringing back a centuries-old craft on Scotland's Ayrshire coast, one blackthorn bush at a time.

The founders of Blackthorn Salt just finished building their second "graduation tower," a stunning structure standing 12 meters tall and 25 meters long. It's filled with 6,000 blackthorn bushes that act like a giant washing line for seawater.

Here's how it works: seawater gets pumped to the top of the tower and trickles down through the dense network of thorns. The coastal winds and the massive surface area of the branches slowly evaporate the water, concentrating it into brine that eventually becomes salt.

The Marshalls are the only people in the UK using this method, and towers like theirs are rare worldwide. Their first tower started producing salt regularly in 2021, and customers fell in love with it.

"It's been an incredible journey, the fact people in Scotland and around Britain love our salt and appreciate and understand why it's produced the way it is," Whirly Marshall said. The new tower took three years of on-and-off work to complete, including the painstaking task of attaching thousands of blackthorn bushes by hand.

The Bright Side

The blackthorn method isn't just old-fashioned, it's genuinely sustainable. Unlike modern salt production that requires intense heat and energy, this approach relies entirely on natural wind and evaporation.

The thorns even add something special to the flavor. "The crystals have each of the five basic tastes," Marshall explained, referring to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

The Marshalls are reviving a tradition that dates back to medieval times on the Ayrshire coast. Historic salt-panning sites once dotted the shoreline, burning coal to heat seawater and produce rudimentary salt.

Now this modern version honors that heritage while proving sustainable methods can create superior products that people genuinely want.