Goodrich Castle

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 story appears in print in 1827 as 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 the year before, 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 early nineteenth century, according to English Heritage's history of the castle, visitors climbed ladders to reach the stairs in the keep, and local guides were on hand for historical information. 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. The year after its 1826 edition, the London-born poet Henry Neele published a short story called simply "Goodrich Castle" in his Romance of History: England. Alice and Clifford come from that story; the newsbooks name neither.

Goodrich Castle is at Castle Lane, Goodrich, Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire HR9 6HY. English Heritage, which runs it, places it 5 miles (8 km) south of Ross-on-Wye, off the A40, and gives a sat-nav position of 51.874633, -2.61373, about 170 metres from the pin on this file. The castle is listed Grade I, list entry 1348917, at national grid reference SO 57685 19990. The site telephone is 01600 890538. On 24 September 2026 English Heritage's page for the castle gave its hours as daily from 10am to 5pm, with last entry at 4.30pm. The ticket page sells Standard, Saver and Super Saver tickets by date, showing a price only once a day is chosen; it offers 15 per cent off for booking in advance, and members go in free. The car park is by the visitor centre, a 400-metre walk from the castle, and non-members pay £4 to use it. According to the facilities page the gift shop is in the visitor centre and the toilets include baby-changing facilities. Picnics are allowed in the grounds and in the dry moat, and dogs on leads are admitted throughout the site, indoor spaces included. English Heritage calls Roaring Meg "the only surviving mortar from the English Civil Wars". It was cast in June 1646 on the orders of Colonel John Birch, reputedly by a local blacksmith in a forge near the castle, and it is displayed at the north-east corner of the inner courtyard. The page on things to do notes that it is kept under cover in winter. The access page states that "the castle is not accessible for wheelchairs", while the café and shop are. Two disabled parking spaces lie within 150 metres of the castle entrance, at the end of the driveway marked no entry, which it describes as a rough track. The page describes the way to the top of the keep as "a steep, narrow and dark spiral staircase", with uneven steps, low light and a rope to help with the climb, and notes steep steps on the ground level, on the first floor and at the access to the dry moat, which "may become slippery when wet". It singles out the limited edge protection at the top of the keep and states that children must be supervised at all times. Historic England retold the story of the drowned lovers on its Heritage Calling blog on 24 October 2016. Twelve English Heritage pages on Goodrich, read on 24 September 2026, contain none of the words ghost, haunted, lovers, drowned, Alice or Clifford, although eight of them name Roaring Meg.