Goodrich Castle United Kingdom

Legendary

A Norman medieval castle ruin near the village of Goodrich.

Photo by David Merrett

Colonel John Birch had a problem in June 1646. The castle he was attacking sat on a ridge above the River Wye with walls too thick to break, so he had a giant mortar cast in a blacksmith's forge nearby and pointed it at the weakest tower.

The gun was nicknamed Roaring Meg. It threw hollow iron balls packed with gunpowder, each weighing around 85 kilograms, timed to explode when they landed. Birch was so pleased with it that he fired the last 19 shots himself.

Roaring Meg is the only surviving mortar from the entire English Civil War, and it sits at the castle today, a few hundred metres from the tower it wrecked.

The castle was already about 550 years old by then. An Anglo-Saxon landowner called Godric of Mappestone built the first version out of earth and wood, shortly after the Normans conquered England in 1066.

People knew it as Godric's Castle, and over the centuries the name wore down into Goodrich. Around the middle of the 1100s someone replaced the wooden fort with a square stone keep, which you can still walk into.

The big rebuild came in the late 1200s under William de Valence, half-brother of King Henry III. He turned Goodrich into a concentric castle, with walls built inside other walls and comfortable rooms tucked safely behind them. The design proved so effective that other castles across England borrowed it.

By the 1640s the castle had passed to the Talbot family and lost most of its military importance, but the Civil War dragged it back in. It changed sides more than once before ending up held by soldiers loyal to King Charles I.

Birch's siege lasted through that summer. Roaring Meg brought down much of the north-west tower, and the defenders surrendered on 31 July 1646, after which Parliament deliberately wrecked the place so nobody could use it again.

Climb the Norman keep for views along the Wye valley, then stand beside Roaring Meg and look at the size of the shells stacked next to it. The north-west tower is still torn open where Birch aimed, which makes the whole siege easy to picture.