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Saltcoats
SALTCOATS, a considerable little town and
sea-port,
partly in the parish of Ardrossan, and partly in that
of Stevenston, Cunningham, Ayrshire. It is 1 mile
east of Ardrossan, 4 south-west of Kilwinning, 7 west
of Irvine, 13 north-west of Troon, 13
south-south-east of Largs, 14 west of Kilmarnock, 28
south-south-east of Greenock, 32 south-west of
Glasgow, and 74 west-north-west of Edinburgh. Its
situation is about the middle of the north or
northwest side of the long but comparatively slender
segmentary indentation of the frith of Clyde, which,
in a large sense, is called the bay of Ayr, —on
ground low and level, and commanding a fair sea-view
only from the very lip of the frith, —in the
neighbourhood of sandy bluffs and flat expanses, —and
altogether so characterized as to be redeemed from
the most irksome tameness only by the prospect,
across the waters, of the splendid forms of Arran. In
the interior, too, the town has so many one-story
houses, and such fields of red tyles along their
roofs, and such deformity and dinginess in the
edifices of its salt-works, and such a prevalence of
the most common village aspect in its streets, as to
be hardly rescued from utter unattractiveness by the
presence of a few good public buildings. Two United
Secession places of worship, and a meeting-house
belonging to the Relief, are plain yet sufficiently
creditable structures. A Gaelic chapel, erected in
1830, and ecclesiastically declared a sort of
parish-church, is a neat little Gothic edifice, with
a Saxon doorway and a small belfry. It stands at the
west end of the town, looking toward Ardrossan, and
is surrounded by an enclosure whose front is
decorated with pillars. The town's branch-office of
the Ayrshire Banking company is a recent and neat
erection. The town-house, begun in 1825, is a
two-story building, with a handsome spire; and is
arranged, in the ground-floor, into shops, and
disposed, in the upper story, into a lock-up-house, a
committee-room, a library-room, and a large apartment
used both as a public reading-room and as the seat of
the justice-of-peace monthly courts.
Saltcoats is believed, on the authority of tradition,
corroborated by the monumental evidence of
con¬siderable heaps of ashes, to have been, at a very
early period, the seat of a manufacture of salt. The
pris¬tine artisans, it is supposed, were poor
persons, who dug up from, very near the surface, as
much coal as was needed for their operations, and
made use only of little pans and kettles, and formed
a kind of squatting community, whose homes were
'cots' on the shore; and who thus originated in their
little cluster of 'salt-cots,' both the nucleus and
the name of the future town. Saltcoats was of so much
note so early as the reign of James V. as to be
erected by him into a burgh-of-barony ; and probably
it retains no practical trace of its burghal
character and privileges simply on account of having,
soon after the receipt of them, suffered some severe
and almost exterminating reverse. About the year 1660
it had so greatly declined as to have only four
houses. But in 1684 Sir Robert Cunningham, the
inheritor of the whole parish of Stevenston, and the
nephew of the gentleman of the name who had purchased
the estate in 1656, commenced a series of operations
which soon advanced the decayed village, in common
with the district in its vicinity, to a condition of
comparative prosperity: he constructed, at what till
that time was called the Creek of Saltcoats, a
harbour which, for the circumstances of the period,
was a work of some magnitude, and which still
continues serviceable; he built several large
salt-pans, and placed the manufacture of salt on an
advantageous footing; and he opened various coal-pits
on his property, and made the new harbour a place of
large export for coal. The few houses which
constituted the village, when his works were
completed, were all low thatched cots. The first
slated house was built in 1703, and still stands in
Quay-street, —an object of some interest to the
inhabitants. The salt manufacture, after undergoing
various fluctuations, has eventually sustained
material and perhaps permanent injury by the repeal
of the salt-duties, and the consequent introduction
of English rock-salt. Instead of seven salt-pans,
which used to be in operation, there are now only
two. A magnesia-work, in connection with the
salt-pans, was the earliest establishment of its kind
in Scotland, and continues to employ a number of
workmen, and to prosper. Ship-building has, at
various periods, been vigorously conducted ; and
during the twenty-six years which ended in 1790, it
produced sixty-four vessels of aggregately 7,095 tons
burthen, and upwards of £70,000 in value; but it has
been singularly fitful, and three or four years ago
looked as if it were totally relinquished.
Rope-making, too, has been a fluctuating trade; but
now seems, on a small scale at least, to be
prospering. A brewery of long standing prospers. Six
or seven vessels, each of from 20 to 70 or 80 tons,
and aggregately employ ingabout fifty persons, go
annually to the North Highland herring-fishing. The
domestic fishery is comparatively neglected. Much the
largest section ol tlie inhabitants are
cotton-weavers, in the employment of the Glasgow and
the Paisley manufacturers. The fabrics woven are
principally gauzes,
lappets, shawls, and trimmings. The number of
looms, including a very few in Ardrossan, was, in
1828, 662; and, in 1838, 572, —all of the latter,
except six, plain. Many females are employed in
muslin hand-sewing. The shipping of the town has
greatly declined; yet it is, in its statistics, so
much
mixed up with that of Ardrossan, that it cannot very
easily be estimated. The principal commerce is with
Ireland, and consists in the exchange of coals for
agricultural and dairy produce Saltcoats, in
addition to the places of worship already mentioned,
has two chapels, the one Independent and the other
Baptist; and it has twelve schools, —one of them
parochial, one a free-school for females, and the
remaining ten private. An annual fair—once a scene
of general barter between the Highlands and the
Lowlands, but now principally for Highland cows
and for pigs and lambs—is held on the last Thursday
of May. Population, in 1821, 3,413; in 1831
3,800.
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