The Wellcome Trust-funded Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall project finished in Autumn of 2024, rounding off two years of collaboration and exploration with our partners at Salford Community Leisure. Our work has been aided by our use of the hall’s gardens, surviving early modern domestic interiors, and workshop spaces where we have been able to remake historical recipes and experiment with the ‘materials of sleep’ the research team have identified. These include flax, linen, flowers, herbs, fats, waxes, spices, and resins. Here are some of our key project milestones:

Workshops:

We have designed a series of workshops for families, school groups, and adult learners using the research of the project team. Staff and volunteers at Ordsall Hall have joined us in discovering the fascinating ways early modern people looked after their sleep, enabling sessions to be carried over into the main public workshop programme beyond the lifetime of the project.

An outdoor wood oven allowed us to bake foods using historic recipes to better explore soporific ingredients within Ordsall’s gardens. We have made early modern lettuce pie, an oven posset, and baked bread and Lancashire oatcakes as part of our focus on sleep, crops, and grains.

We also led cooking sessions inside the hall where we:

• recreated medicinal syrups,
• barley waters,
• possets,
• herbal infusions,
• butter,
• fresh cheeses,
• fruit curds,
• conserves

Each of these sessions included conversations about the usefulness of recreating foods from early modern recipes, the humoral qualities of ingredients, and the impact these ingredients were believed to have on the body, the mind, and the ability to sleep.

Waxes and fats were used during several sessions to make soothing salves with soporific essential oils and light sources including beeswax and candleberry dipped candles and tallow rush lights. Fats were also a key ingredient in our exploration of bedbug deterrents, alongside strong smells from burnt spices, onions, resins such as camphor, and lavender.

The bedbug and lighting sessions, as well as a workshop on natural bedding materials, have allowed Ordsall’s visitors to contribute to the project’s research. Whether through observations on the practical challenges of candle making, the supportive nature of oat chaff mattress stuffing, or the strong scents emitted from camphor when making remedies, these workshops have prompted the research team to investigate different avenues in their consideration of sleep. These public workshops have also resulted in further remaking sessions taking place at the university’s archaeology lab to trial and test different materials linked to sleep.

School Resources:

We now offer a new KS2 digital programme called Sleeping Well which features a range of videos, activities, and information sheets. Schools can use these in the classroom or combine them with a visit to Ordsall Hall. Year 4 school children at Primrose Hill Primary School in Ordsall and Park Road Primary School in Sale have helped us create these resources with their teachers through programme trials, workshops, discussions, and feedback.

Onsite Interpretation:

New displays are now installed in the Ordsall Hall gardens and kitchen, designed to bring together the materials of sleep sourced in the surrounding landscape with the sleep remedy-making and soporific culinary recipes created indoors. Four recipes can be found in the kitchens: a lettuce poultice, an apple curd, a rose conserve, and barley water. These recipes were designed to cool the body’s extremities or for inhalation, both methods were believed to induce sleep.

Feedback:

Workshop participants told us how the Ordsall Hall sessions had helped them develop new skills, to meet new people, and get involved in historical research. They also enjoyed how the calming nature of the sessions, which enhanced their own sense of wellbeing, and highlighted the connections between historic spaces, nature, and practical learning.

2025 marks the start of our new Sleeping Well at Ordsall Hall project, now funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This next phase is focused on creative health and wellbeing, largely inspired by the positive feedback from the public over the past two years. We are working with local health sector partners to create a new programme aimed at helping Salford residents improve their wellbeing through investigations of historic healthcare ideas that aimed to bring the body into balance with its environment. You can read more about our new project here.

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