History Hunters

History Hunters will be appearing in every issue of Heritage in Wales. We’ll help you enjoy Welsh history! You can cut out and keep the pages if you like!

Hi! I’m Wil and this is Cate. We go on lots of adventures together. She’s the sensible one and knows everything about anything! Wil’s always getting into scrapes, so it’s just as well that I’m here to get him out of trouble!

This is Gelert. He loves digging up the past!

Come and join us on our quest to rediscover history!

Bleurgh! That’s a bit ripe!

Hmmm. . . snore . . . snore . . nice castle. . . nice cool moat for a dip

I’m soooooo bored

Wil, Cate & Gelert– in lockdown. . . .

Suddenly. . .

C’mon Cate! The water’s great! Just then . .

‘ Tis my lord’s special gong! The best gong there is

I’d go for a swim if it had some water in it

Meanwhile . .

Tum-te-tum-te-tum, some more gong for my farm WIL . . N O O O O O !! Yuck! I’m not swimming in that

Blimey, that was close! Castle moats were minging, full of gong.. . I’m never going near one of them. . .

C’mon Wil, wake up! I’m filling the pool

Y I K E S !

Too late . .

Not even dogs want to smell like that

Wil, there’s the gong farmer. He collects all the poo and pee from the castle’s toilets. . . this toilet has been emptying into the moat!

How they poo’d in a castle loo!

Beaumaris Castle is the greatest castle never built! It was never finished, but if it had been it would have been the best castle ever. Even the toilets were brilliant(ish). 30 toilets were built at Beaumaris for the soldiers and servants living in the castle. So what were they like?

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These toilets were the best that money could buy. Just think what it might have been like for a poor person living in a hut! Bleurgh! 1 There were toilets on each floor of the castle. They were small rooms with a door, and walls painted with lime to help kill the germs. 2 You could get into them from the top of the walls or by passages running through the walls. 3 They were built in a line on top of one another and each toilet was connected to a long, narrow shaft. 4 The wee and poo dropped down the shafts and collected in a big, smelly pit at the bottom. 5 There would have been a wooden seat to sit on and grass or moss was used to wipe your bum. 6 Extra shafts ran through the castle walls to circulate fresh air around.

But, in fact, the toilets were so stinky that people often kept their clothes in them. The toxic fumes killed the lice and bugs! 7 The waste collected in the cesspits and dribbled into the moat. The solid stuff was dug out by the gong farmer and used as fertilizer to help grow crops. Yum!

History heroes!

Whether it’s our teacher, our doctor or the delivery driver, heroes are everywhere, working hard to make our world better. Wales is a nation bursting with heroes. So many heroic people in Wales’s past helped their friends, families and communities through tough times and made their lives better.

Some of the heroes from our history that we can think of are:

Gwenllian, a Welsh warrior princess, the only woman to lead a Welsh army. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, the prince of Gwynedd who united Wales. And we can’t forget Owain Glyndŵr, the freedom fighter who fought a war to make Wales independent.

Junk modelling challenge!

Your #CadwChallenge is to create a sculpture of someone special from our wonderful Welsh history to celebrate their awesomeness!

Post a photo of your model on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram — Cadw Wales @CadwWales or @CadwCymru CadwCymruWales — tag Cadw and then explain your reason for choosing him/her as your hero. Do this (by 1 Sept) and you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win a Pathfinders ‘flying dragon’ mechanical toy kit. You can use anything to bring your hero to life and it can be as big as you like. Think kitchen roll tubes, plastic bottles, cardboard boxes and egg cartons — whatever you can find around the house!

Or you could use things from your garden like wood, sticks, stones or leaves. Some glue or paint might be useful as well!

It’s time to get hands-on with history! Good luck!

Past playtimes

People have enjoyed Nine Men’s Morris for centuries. It was a very popular game in medieval times and is simple and fun to play. Why not have a go?

How to play Nine Men’s Morris

Each player starts with nine tokens — you can use any tokens as long as you have nine of the same colour. Or you could cut out the tokens provided on this page.

To begin, each player takes turns to place their tokens on the board, one per play. Once all the tokens are on the board, players take it in turns to move one of their tokens:

• A token can be moved from one dot to another along the lines. • A token can only be moved one place at a time. • A token cannot be moved onto a dot that is already occupied by another token. Whenever a player forms a mill (three tokens in a row) that player can take one of their opponent’s tokens off the board (as long as it doesn’t form part of a mill itself).

If all the opponent’s tokens are inside a mill then an exception is made and the player can take any token.

The game is won when a player can’t move their tokens or if they have only two tokens left.