Goodrich Castle

Goodrich Castle stands in red sandstone above a bend of the River Wye in Herefordshire, and its ruin is the work of a siege that can be followed almost week by week. In 1646 the Parliamentarian colonel John Birch had a mortar cast on the spot — the gun now known as Roaring Meg — and battered Sir Henry Lingen's Royalist garrison into surrendering on 31 July. The ghost story attached to the place is a love story: Alice Birch, said to be the colonel's niece, and Charles Clifford, a Royalist officer, are supposed to have ridden out of the doomed castle and drowned in the flooded Wye, and to ride into it again whenever a storm comes down the valley. The oldest printed version of that story we have been able to date is not folklore but fiction: a short story called "Goodrich Castle", written by the poet Henry Neele and published in his Romance of History: England. The siege papers, reprinted for tourists two years earlier, list by name every officer who surrendered, and no Clifford is among them. This page tells both: the siege that happened, and the tale that was written.

Goodrich Castle takes its name from Godric Mappestone, the Englishman who held the manor when Domesday Book was compiled. The oldest thing standing is the square Norman keep in the middle of the courtyard, built of grey stone; everything around it is the local red sandstone, quarried out of the rock the castle sits on, which is why the walls and the dry moat below them are the same colour. King John granted Goodrich to William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, in 1203, and Marshal threw a towered curtain wall around the old keep. The castle a visitor walks through today is mostly the work of William de Valence, half-brother to Henry III, who from the 1280s demolished Marshal's work and raised a concentric castle of the sort Edward I was building in north Wales — a rare thing in England itself. His son Aymer added the outer barbican before his death in 1324. Goodrich then passed to the Talbots, earls of Shrewsbury, and in 1616 to the Greys, earls of Kent, who never lived there and let it to tenants. The last of them, a local lawyer named Richard Tyler, was still renovating it in the 1630s. Then came the war, and Goodrich is one of the few English sieges that can be followed almost week by week, because the London newsbooks printed the letters as they arrived. The Earl of Stamford held the castle for Parliament until December 1643; after his withdrawal it was garrisoned for the King by Sir Henry Lingen, with about 200 men and 90 horses, and Lingen used it to raid Parliamentary forces across the county. On the morning of 10 March 1645/6 Colonel John Birch, coming from Hereford, and Colonel Robert Kyrle, coming from Monmouth, fell on the stables: they took sixty-four horses with the hay and provisions, burned the stables down and seized most of the men in the passage house. The Perfect Diurnall for the week of 16-22 March carried the report. Birch came back in earnest at the start of June. He had already told the committee that without battering cannon "I may sit down long enough before it; Lingen being an excepted person, and one unto whom I cannot grant any honourable terms." On 1 June his pioneers began digging approaches to within pistol shot of the ramparts; a summons sent in on 13 June was flatly refused. One of the Cavaliers shouted down at the miners that they cared not for being blown up, they could from the sky laugh at the flourishing of the Roundheads. The Royalists sallied out, surprised the main guard, killed eight men and briefly held both of Birch's mortar pieces — they tried to break them, could not, and retreated carrying away a lighted grenade. It was during this siege that Roaring Meg was made. Birch wrote to the Speaker from Goodrich on 18 June 1646 that he was pressing the work with "my batteries, mortar pieces, and mining, being the three ways we now put in execution, having cast a mortar piece here, which carries a shell of 200lbs. weight", and asked for eighty barrels of powder. A letter of 4 July adds the calibre: "Our mortar piece is 15 inches diameter". Birch turned it on the north-west tower, mining underneath at the same time; Lingen's counter-mine was buried when the tower came down. The surrender was agreed on four articles, the last of which required that it "be performed personally the same day, (viz.) July 31st, 1646" — a Friday. The newsbooks printed the inventory: Sir Henry Lingen, a long list of named officers and gentlemen, sixty common soldiers, 120 arms, four barrels of powder and thirty of beer. Parliament had the castle slighted the following year, and the Countess of Kent took £1,000 in damages rather than rebuild. The ruin then became a destination. William Gilpin put Goodrich in Observations on the River Wye in 1782 as an example of the "correctly picturesque"; Wordsworth visited in 1793 and got We Are Seven out of a conversation with a little girl in the ruins. By the 1820s there was a guidebook on sale at the gate and Victorian tourists paid sixpence to wander in. That tourist trade produced the book that matters most here: Thomas Dudley Fosbroke's The Wye Tour, or Gilpin on the Wye, which reprinted the 1646 siege papers in full for holidaymakers. Two years after its 1826 edition, the Leicester-born poet Henry Neele published a short story called simply "Goodrich Castle" in his Romance of History: England. It is that story, and not the newsbooks, that gives us Alice and Clifford.

Goodrich Castle is at Castle Lane, Goodrich, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire HR9 6HY, signposted off the A40 between Ross-on-Wye and Monmouth. It is a Grade I listed building and a Scheduled Monument, and it is run by English Heritage; the site telephone is 01600 890538. As advertised on 12 August 2026 it opens daily from 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4.30pm, but the season shortens in winter and English Heritage varies it year to year, so check before travelling. Admission is free to members; for everyone else the price depends on the date chosen, sold as Standard, Saver and Super Saver tickets, with a discount for booking online in advance. There is a visitor centre with a tearoom, a shop and toilets, and the dry moat is used for picnics. Roaring Meg is here, and it is worth the trip on its own: the mortar Birch had cast during the siege is the only surviving mortar of the English Civil War, it was preserved by Herefordshire Council, it returned to the castle in 2004, and English Heritage displays it in the castle courtyard along with cannonballs dug up on the site in the 1920s. Access is genuinely restricted and English Heritage says so plainly: "The castle is not accessible for wheelchairs." The tearoom and shop are. There is disabled parking on the level of the visitor centre and two spaces closer in, and blue badge holders may drive along the marked driveway to within about 150 metres of the entrance, though that last stretch is a rough track. Paths on the site are bonded gravel with some short but steep slopes. Inside, "access to the keep is via a steep, narrow and dark spiral staircase", there are steep steps on the ground and first floors and down into the dry moat, they get slippery in the wet, edge protection at the top of the keep is limited and the keep, guardroom and dungeon are dimly lit; children need supervising throughout. There are accessible toilets, and assistance dogs are welcome, with dog bowls at the visitor centre. One warning for anyone coming for the ghost. There is nothing to see: no marked spot, no cave, no plaque. The ferry crossing of Neele's story is gone, the drowning place was never fixed to a point on the bank, and English Heritage's own interpretation does not mention the lovers. The river below the castle floods hard and fast in winter and the banks are slippery; the Wye is not a place to go looking for anything in a storm.