Na Muilte Salainn · Co. Wexford
A name from a vanished industry, and Tintern Abbey at the end of the road.
Saltmills is the village you might miss on the way to Tintern Abbey. A bend in the road, a small bridge over the tidal creek, a chapel, a clutch of houses, and the woodland gates of the abbey a few minutes south. The name is the first thing worth knowing - it is not a corruption or a translation, it is a description. Salt mills stood here. Sea-water was drawn off the inlet at high tide, run into shallow pans, evaporated and finally boiled down on coal or turf to leave crystals behind. Salt was the medieval preservative - without it, fish did not travel and meat did not winter. By the time you could buy mined salt from England in barrels, the mills had nothing to do. They went. The name did not.
The other thing to know is that almost everything you might come for is south of the village rather than in it. Tintern de Voto, the Cistercian abbey William Marshal vowed from a storm in Bannow Bay and built around 1200, is a kilometre down the road on its own wooded estate, with five waymarked Coillte trails, a thirteenth-century church, and the Colclough walled garden across the bridge. From the village itself you can walk the bay shore, look back across the water at the spit where the Normans landed in 1169, and not see anything that says so. That is part of the appeal. Saltmills does not tell you what happened here. You have to know.
