A medieval salt works
Why it is called Saltmills
Salt was made on this inlet in the medieval and early-modern period by a process called salt-panning. Sea-water was let in at high tide and held in shallow rectangular pans cut into the foreshore or built up with clay banks. Sun and wind did the first work; once the brine was concentrated enough it was drawn into iron pans and boiled over peat or coal until the salt crystallised. The product fed the fish and meat trade out of Bannow Bay and the wider south-Wexford coast in the centuries before refrigeration. The mills closed long before living memory. The place name is the only above-ground record.
The abbey on the vow
Tintern de Voto
Around 1200 William Marshal, First Earl of Pembroke and the most powerful Norman in Ireland, was caught in a bad storm crossing to Wexford. He vowed that if he made shore alive he would found an abbey. He made landfall at Bannow Bay. He kept the vow. Cistercians were brought from his Welsh foundation at Tintern in Monmouthshire - the Welsh house became Tintern Major, the Wexford one Tintern de Voto, Tintern of the Vow. The Colclough family took it at the Dissolution in 1536 and lived in the converted nave until 1959. The state took over in 1963. The thirteenth-century nave, chancel and tower still stand and you can walk into them. Free to the grounds; a charge for the building.
The landing seen from the other side
Bannow Bay from the back
On 1 May 1169 Robert FitzStephen and his Welsh-Norman force beached on the eastern shore of Bannow Bay, took Wexford town the week after, and started the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. Saltmills sits on the western shore of the same bay, looking across the water at the spit where it happened. There is no marker on the Saltmills side. There does not need to be. Stand at the shore at low tide and you can see the bay the same shape it has always been, sandbanks shifting only a little year to year. The ships came in at the far side. The story started over there.