Each year the Trust is required to submit a report to the Charity Commission. You can read them here.
Annual Report 2013
Mellor Archaeological Trust
ANNUAL REPORT TO CHARITY COMMISSION (2013)
The Trust’s purpose is to support research in the archaeology of Mellor, Stockport, Greater Manchester, and to bring it to the public in a variety of ways.
The major activity in 2013 was to complete stage 1 (development) of an application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for the project “Revealing Oldknow’s Legacy: Mellor Mill and the Peak Forest Canal n Marple”. This was carried out jointly with Canal and River Trust. The stage 2 (delivery) application was submitted in May and an award of £1.5 million was made in September. With additional matching funds and the notional cost of volunteer time, the total project came out at £2,315,556.
The Trust’s main effort will be devoted to opening up the 18th-18th industrial complex to form Mellor Mill Heritage Park. When it was built by Samuel Oldknow in 1790-92, it was the largest and most impressive cotton mill in the world and the final flowering of water power. The mill was burnt out in 1892, all remaining buildings had been removed by the 1950s. The three areas of the complex, the mill site, the workshops nearer the River Goyt, and Oldknow’s mansion, reverted to woodland.
Annual Report 2012
MELLOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST
ANNUAL REPORT TO CHARITY COMMISSION (2012)
No further work was carried out at the Mellor Old Vicarage site. In July, a two-week dig by students and Trust volunteers at Shaw Cairn on Mellor Moor was led by Dr Bob Johnston of Sheffield University and Donald Reid from the Trust. Unfortunately bad weather before and during the dig hampered the work. The farmer had been unable to cut the grass, so that excavations in the adjacent fields, which had produced interesting results in 2011, could not be continued. Attention turned to two bumps in the ground in the area around the cairn, but one could not be excavated because a bird was nesting on it. The other, adjacent to the field wall, did not yield anything of archaeological interest. It is planned to continue to work annually to find out more about this site and particularly where people would have lived in Neolithic and Bronze Age times.
Annual Report 2011
MELLOR ARCHAEOLOGICAL TRUST
ANNUAL REPORT TO CHARITY COMMISSION (2011)
The Trust has three areas of interest.
From 1998 to 2009, all accessible areas of The Old Vicarage garden and parts of the fields were dug with many members of Greater Manchester Archaeological Federation Societies taking part. There was a small dig in the triangular field in 2011. Although more might be done in the fields, the hard physical work has now moved elsewhere. Two actions remain for the OV site. (1) The viewing area with a bridge over a section of the Iron Age ditch is about to be transferred to Stockport Council. (2) As part of the final report to HLF on the broader Mellor Heritage Project 2007-9, John Roberts wrote an overview of the excavations and their significance plus two volumes of specialist reports. Peter Arrowsmith is now extending this for publication as a BAR report, with Steve Bellshaw adding drawings.