Wiltshire Council’s gritters may soon come out as temperatures drop and snow becomes likely, but they can only cover certain roads.

The council says all key routes in Wiltshire will receive precautionary salting when ice is forecast.

This will include all motorways, trunk roads, class A and B roads and the more important lower-class roads.

The key routes in the Wiltshire Council area total a length of 1160km (725miles) which is 25% of the entire maintained road network.

A single precautionary salting treatment will cost, on average, £17,000.

But the majority of minor roads will receive no treatment, and because arrangements may not always go according to plan, you should never assume a road has been salted.

The decision to salt is based on road temperatures, rather than air temperatures, and salting is likely whenever road temperatures are near freezing.

Factors like moisture, heat retention and time of day or night will influence the decision.

Treatment by salt is normally carried out after the evening peak traffic period or before the morning rush, this is because frost and ice do not normally affect road surfaces until late evening or early morning.

Usually, it takes two hours to complete a salting route.

The council provide a 24-hour gritter response service in bad weather.

If temperatures are predicted to remain below freezing after the morning rush, then a larger network may be salted.

This additional network includes mainly lower class roads serving housing estates and main accesses to villages and hamlets.

During longer periods of cold weather, the council may instruct salting to deal with persistent ice on minor roads which are not included within the precautionary or community networks and invoke arrangements with town and parish councils to take action in their area.

A new £3.5m salting depot in Warminster was recently opened by the council to tackle the incoming winter weather.

The new depot hosts five gritters from the council’s 24-strong fleet and stores 4,000 tonnes of salt.

There are six dedicated salt depots around the county.

In October Wiltshire Council’s winter maintenance teams began gearing up for the colder weather by taking the gritters out on test runs.

Last year the crews were deployed 41 times and distributed 5,000 tonnes of salt across approximately 730 miles of A and B roads.

To find out more about gritting and snow clearance in Wiltshire, people should click here.