Learning from the past, looking to the future: A Q&A with Melanie Giles

07 Feb 2025

Professor Melanie Giles was awarded the Humanities Strategic Civic Engagement Fund (HSCEF) in 2023 for her project on restoring Lindow Moss, a raised peat bog on the edge of Wilmslow.

Each year, the HSCEF, the Faculty’s flagship social responsibility fund, provides funding to several projects that are inspired by our location in Greater Manchester and aim to improve communities across our city-region.

In 2023, Melanie Giles, Professor of European Prehistory in SALC’s Archaeology Department, was a recipient of the HSCEF. She has since been dedicated to championing the restoration of Lindow Moss, a sprawling wetland in the heart of a suburban area and the home of Britain's most famous bog body, Lindow Man.

With the support of her wider project team, the local community and organisations across Manchester, Melanie’s project, Learning from the past, looking to the future with peatland communities, continues to thrive, now a hub of ongoing civic engagement with peatlands.

We spoke to Melanie to find out more about what inspired her work, the impact on the local community, and the value of the HSCEF in helping to bring her mission to life.

Can you tell us more about your project?

This was a project to engage with local communities around Manchester who are living in and around the old peatlands. We work particularly with a community group in Wilmslow who are trying to restore a raised bog called Lindow Moss.

In getting to know the landscape better, I also got to know the local community and collaborate with them to champion its restoration as a wonderful wetland habitat right in the heart of an urban area. This project aimed to help them maximise the cultural heritage of that place.

What did you hope to achieve with your project?

As an archaeologist, it’s about making the past matter. It’s about showing how we can learn from past ways of life, different ways of seeing those landscapes, of living in and with them more respectfully.

Because these are carbon sumps, we’ve been cutting the peat for thousands of years to use as fuel and have destroyed the wetland heritage of the North-west region, re-releasing stored carbon and adding to climate change.

If we can restore them, we can sequester carbon and tip them over into being a possible response to climate change, and a rich ecological niche that can help improve biodiversity and provide an extraordinary, quite strange, but rare place for people to visit.

My ultimate aim is to re-enchant people with the Moss through working in partnership with community groups, heritage practitioners, charitable organisations and academics in a properly interdisciplinary fashion, so that my tiny bit of archaeology that I love is feeding into a wider sense of care and respect for those places.

How did your project support the University's social responsibility and civic engagement priorities?

It’s that challenge of making research matter and making sure that you're showing that those stories have a social value that enhances people's connection with place. The University's commitment to its local communities has rubbed off on me. It has been intensely rewarding to work with the communities on the doorstep. It gave them a sense of belonging and it opened conversations about the past.

How was your project enhanced and inspired by our location in Greater Manchester?

In one of my mum’s sketchbooks from when she was a teenager, I found a watercolour of Ashton Moss. Now, it's under concrete. I realised there was a huge wetland landscape that had been there when she was growing up, so I felt this very intense connection with that place.

I felt strongly that my job at Manchester was reconnecting with part of my own heritage and that gave me an extra-special feeling of responsibility to those communities. It is Manchester's location as an industrial city surrounded by what would have once been extraordinary wetland areas. We’re only now re-embracing their importance in climate change, but also as a resource for local communities. It feels like there's nowhere else I could do this, and it’s lovely to think when you're in a job with a massive institution that you're in the right place.

What has been the biggest impact that your project has had?

I think it's the opening of a door. The project is finite, but the notion that you have created a set of ongoing relationships and obligations is important to me. That’s what social responsibility means, doesn't it? I feel like I belong in that community in a way, so my biggest impact has been helping them realise just how special their landscape is. They now describe that bog body as their champion, their local hero.

In relation to your project, is there anything planned for the future?

I’m doing a lot of work with grave goods and ancient burials, and we're working with colleagues in Bradford to develop a resource for primary school teachers to use the past as a way of opening conversations around grief and loss.

The other side of the project was all creative and the British Academy are going to host that in an exhibition in May. They've asked me to take part in a public lecture, so I am representing the bog.

More championing of the bog, more networking with local community charities and restoration groups to do this elsewhere. It’s really positive and fuels you with a sense of hope in difficult times.

How has the funding from the HSCEF aided your project?

Immeasurably – I mean it. We brought the local and academic communities together at our workshop, we were able to host a wonderful conference which gave the local community a platform. It also brought curators up from the British Museum which helped support and nurture respect and mutual listening between museums.

On the creative side, we were able to work with local artists to create new visions of the bog. We had colour landscape collage by Rose Ferraby, ceramic sculptures by Liz Ellis, Abbi Flint was our poet.

It’s that little bit of seed corn money to create something that, because it's so attractive and beautiful, goes on to have another life. In all these activities, you create a hub, and those events are having their own ripple effects. To be able to have that privileged access to money that means you can work in this interdisciplinary way. Normally we're so siloed, but this grant deliberately wants us to work outside our comfort zone and find new connections and new communities to work with.

What advice would you give to anyone wanting to launch their own project through this fund?

Find good partners and challenge yourself. Think creatively and publicly. For me, it was that sense of loving the research I do but wanting it to find a new audience, wanting it to matter more. What do I do that can make a difference for those local communities? There will be lots of people in the University who will have those stories but might not realise that this money can make some of those things happen.

In the research world, I think it's incumbent upon us to make sure that what we do is as useful as possible and that can be in this wonderful, creative, joyous way. That is one of the bits that's brought me most pleasure, watching other people take some of your ideas and turn them into something beautiful and engaging, I couldn't have foreseen that.

To find out more about Melanie’s project, visit the Lindow Moss community website.

Find out more about the Humanities Strategic Civic Engagement Fund.