Ile de Re Salt Marshes
— — the geometry the sea leaves behind.
Not only on a wall.
“A grid of shallow pans on the northern half of the island, worked since at least the seventh century and expanded by Cistercian monks from the twelfth, then by the families who hold the trade now. About a hundred sauniers still rake by hand. The squares fill and dry through summer, and by August the surface holds white crusts that get skimmed off before they sink. This is fleur de sel, the salt that only forms on hot, still days. From above the marshes read as a patchwork of pink, white and brown rectangles. From the path through them the horizon is mostly sky.
Ile de Re Salt Marshes, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The salt marshes occupy the northern third of Île de Ré, an island of about 85 square kilometres in the Charente-Maritime department off the Atlantic coast of France. The island is joined to La Rochelle by a 2.9-kilometre toll bridge opened in 1988. The active salt-producing zone covers roughly 400 hectares between the villages of Loix, Ars-en-Ré, Saint-Clément-des-Baleines and Les Portes-en-Ré, a fraction of the 30,000 hectares worked here in the Middle Ages. The marshes share the island's western half with the Réserve naturelle nationale de Lilleau des Niges, a Ramsar-listed wetland that draws more than 300 bird species in migration.
Salt has been gathered here since at least the seventh century, with the basin networks systematically expanded by Cistercian monks from the twelfth century onward. The process is hydraulic and entirely solar. Seawater enters at high tide and travels through a sequence of progressively shallower pans, losing water to evaporation at each step until the brine saturates. The grey coarse salt, gros sel, crystallises on the clay floor and is raked out by hand with a long wooden tool. On hot still afternoons a thin lace of white crystals forms on the surface and is skimmed off before it sinks. This is fleur de sel, about five percent of the harvest by weight. Today the cooperative counts roughly 100 working sauniers.
The active harvest runs from late May to mid-September. Production depends on three things at once: full sun, low rainfall, and a steady breeze. Fleur de sel only crystallises on the surface when the air is hot and still enough for a film to form, which is why a single July week can yield more than a damp month either side of it. Off-season the pans are drained, the bunds repaired and the clay floors resealed by hand. Outside summer the marshes belong to the birds. The Réserve naturelle nationale de Lilleau des Niges hosts overwintering Eurasian spoonbills, avocets, black-tailed godwits and brent geese. The Écomusée du Marais Salant at Loix runs guided walks across a working salt farm from April through October.