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| Stirling Castle, Scotland Credit: Sandy Gillone, Scotland |
BBC reader submitted. I hadn't heard of the castle before (well, there are a LOT of them in Scotland), so I checked the website for visiting. I learned some history about the castle and 5 terrible jobs that children had during the middle ages. Here's that info from the castle webpage. Visiting info follows.
ABOUT STIRLING CASTLE-Stirling Castle, located in Stirling, is one of the largest and most important castles in Scotland, both historically and architecturally. The castle sits atop Castle Hill, an intrusive crag, which forms part of the Stirling Sill geological formation.
LOCATION: Castle Esplanade, Stirling FK8 1EJ, United Kingdom
CONSTRUCTED : Castle dates from at least early 12th century, present buildings mostly built between 1490 and 1600
Here's the story about the Top 5 worst jobs children had!
5. Whipping Boy
Members of the royal family were much too special to be punished for anything they did wrong, so as Royal Whipping Boy it was your job to take their punishment when the prince or princess misbehaved.Can you imagine that happening in school today?
4. Peat cutter
As a Peat Cutter you’d be working in a bog. No, not a toilet, a peat bog!
Peat is a mixture of rotten grass, plants and small animals. It looks a lot like mud and is really soggy and very squelchy.
Your job as a peat cutter would be to help cut the peat into squares, which you’d then pile up to dry. Once it had dried out, you would carry it into the house to be used on the fire.
3. Shepherd Boy
This might sound like quite a good job at first: shepherds spent their time lying on the hills in the sunshine watching sheep graze all around them, right? Wrong! You were more likely to spend your time sheltering from the rain, soaking wet and freezing cold!
But that’s not the worst of it. As a Shepherd Boy, it would also have been your job to ‘pop’ the sheep. As you might know, sheep like eating clover but it makes them very… well… gassy! Your job was to spot the swollen ones and ‘pop’ them in a certain place to let the gas out.
2. Climbing boy
Sadly, this job didn’t mean you’d spend all day climbing trees! In fact, Climbing Boy or Girl was just another name for a chimney sweep.
From the age of 5 or 6 you’d climb up inside chimneys with a big brush and sweep all the soot out. It was dark, dirty and very dangerous - lots of climbing boys and girls got lost or fell and hurt themselves.
Here at the castle there’s a tale of one young climbing boy who climbed into the Palace chimneys and was never seen again…
1. Gong-scourer’s Boy
This is officially the worst job in the world!
A Gong-scourer was paid to clean out cess-pits. A cess-pit is a big hole in the ground where all the poo, pee and other disgusting stuff ended up. There weren’t any pipes to take it away back then!
As the Gong-scourer’s boy you’d be left with the jobs even your boss couldn’t stomach – like crawling into the smallest, dirtiest spaces of the cess-pit to clean them out!
The yucky mess had two layers: squidgy solid goo at the bottom, and a yellow-brown liquid on the top. You would get covered in both. Eugh! As nobody wanted to see (or smell!) you during the day, you would have to work during the night.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, rotting sewage gives off a gas called hydrogen sulphide (which smells like rotten eggs). If you didn’t get very ill or die from touching all the germs in the goo, chances were breathing in that gas might kill you.
VISIT THE CASTLE! https://www.stirlingcastle.scot/
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