Understanding our heritage and how our landscape has changed over thousands of years is important if we are to make real changes to our future. This is why the Carbon Landscape Partnership, along with the Lancashire Mining Museum, a local play writer Julie Mckiernan and the Healthy Hearts organisation with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund developed a promenade play called ‘The Life and Times of Chat Moss’.
Using the outstanding back drop of the Lancashire Mining Museum, the audience was taken on three different journeys. Their first stop was all about Chat Moss. How did this remarkable landscape develop and why it is so important that we protect it? There was even talks about how this could be made into a Broadway show, ‘Bogs, the Musical’, has a great ring to it we think! They then moved on to learn about the industrial revolution. Firstly, by characters who portrayed people with wealth like the Duke of Bridgewater, showcasing how they benefited from all these changes and then by the people who actually worked the mines. Their true stories taken from historical archives or diaries, their stories brought to life what it was really like for them and their families during these times. Finally, we looked at how the world is today. How the landscape has changed and what impact this is having on our planet. How we need to come together and take those small steps to make big changes.
Life and Times of Chat Moss © 2022 by Carbon Landscape is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0